Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse number 91, which reads as follows.
uyunjanti satimanto naniketi ramantite hangsava palalanghitva okamogam jahantite Which means,
uyunjanti satimanto, the mindful exert themselves, or the mindful work hard.
Nanikete ramantite, they don't delight in dwellings, or they don't delight in dwellings, in homes.
Hangsawa palalanghitwa, just as a, or like a swan
having abandoned the lake, abandoned the lake.
They abandoned house after house, home after home.
So this story, or this verse, was told in relation to a story that's actually interesting in relation to the verse, because it actually implies something of the opposite, what you would think.
From the sounds of this verse, you would think that the Buddha was saying that a person who is mindful exerts themselves.
Such a person should, you would most likely expect,
to avoid having a home and wander.
So here we have this story.
The Buddha was going on pilgrimage, wandering, charika.
The Buddha would go around India to teach.
So traveling from place to place and living and talking with people, debating sometimes with people, with other ascetics.
Sometimes lay people would come and debate with him or ask him difficult questions.
and he would teach and answer and spread his teachings throughout India.
So he was getting ready to go, and all the monks knew that the Buddha was getting ready to go, and so they all prepared, packed up their things, they scrubbed out their bowls and gathered up their robes, and then they saw Maha Kasapa, who was washing his robe,
And they started snickering to themselves or frowning, turning up their noses at this.
Because this is a clear indication that Maha Kasaba wasn't ready to go.
And he wasn't going.
And they said, oh, I know.
One of them said, I know what's going on here.
Here's a guy who is attached to houses.
He's attached to his dwelling.
I mean, who wouldn't be?
He's famous and he's loved by all the lay people and they give him the best choices of food and robes and everything he wants.
He gets here.
If I got that, I wouldn't leave either.
So no doubt he's staying here because he's attached to it and he's comfortable with it.
And so they gossiped and were rather fairly mean-spirited, it sounds like.
maybe not mean-spirited, but they certainly misrepresented his intention, because the Buddha heard about it.
Well, what happened then, everyone left, all the monks left, and Maha Kasaba went with them, but he got to a certain point, and the Buddha turned and said to Maha Kasaba, Maha Kasaba, you stay behind.
And the monks nodded and said to themselves, said to each other, now there you go, even the Buddha knows that Mahakaspa can't leave this place, he's too attached to it.
And so when they were sitting down, I guess in the evening, or they were talking amongst themselves when they were walking, maybe the Buddha turned and said, what are you guys talking about?
What are you bhikkhus engaged in discussion about?
And they told him, and he said, that's ridiculous, that's not at all, he didn't use those words, but he said, that's not at all why Mahakasipa was not ready to go, and that's not at all why I asked him to turn around.
Because Mahakasipa made, he said, made a determination in his past lives to be a support for lay people.
And so he gives a long story about when he made this determination, but for our purposes it's not really useful.
The point is he had this intention to stay and be of benefit to people.
If all the monks left, then who would stay to teach and who would stay to care for and encourage and really support the meditators and the practitioners in the areas?
So, Maha Kasaba knew that he and the Buddha were actually very close.
And when the Buddha passed away, Maha Kasaba was sort of looked upon as the leader of sorts.
Though not to take the place of the Buddha, but to take over some of the role of guidance and direction.
So when the Buddha left to go on his tour, Maha Kassapa knew it was best for him to stay behind because otherwise there would be many things left undone and many people looking to learn about the Dhamma who wouldn't get to hear it and so on.
And the Buddha said, this is, he told this long story about, well, he told a story anyway about Mahakasapa making this wish to be of benefit to people and to not go out of his way.
And then the Buddha said that, he pointed out using this verse, he actually pointed out that it's not that, it's not that people who are mindful, who are enlightened, like an arahant,
It's not that they are the ones, or they are not the ones who need to leave houses.
They need to leave their dwellings and need to be careful because they have no attachment.
A person who has no attachment has no problem staying behind.
It's the exact person that you want to have stay in one place and teach and to spread the teachings.
So it kind of put the other monks in the place because the implication is, well, you guys have to come with me so I can take care of you and so you can not be attached to one place for too long.
And so in Thailand you get this a lot.
Monks will wander and never spend more than one night or never spend more than one week in one place.
I've talked to monks who spent the whole year outside of the reins.
They wouldn't spend two nights in a row in the same spot, so they would constantly be moving.
It's harder to do now, but there are monks who do this.
I'm not convinced that it's the greatest thing to do, but there's a sense that, well, when you're still attached to dwellings, that can be quite useful to keep you on your toes.
So this is our story.
And the verse, which is fairly clear, but let's just go through it.
So Satimanto Uryunjanti, that the mindful are not lazy, is basically what's being said here, because there was an implication that Mahakasaba was lazy.
He just couldn't be bothered to go on a tour.
Why bother when everything is so comfortable here?
The Buddha pointed out that even when mindful people stay in one spot, you can't call them lazy.
They will never get lazy because they're mindful.
A person who stays put, even a person who does nothing but walk and sit all day, shouldn't be considered lazy.
Their mindfulness keeps them alert, keeps them energetic, keeps them from being lazy.
So it's not necessarily the case that just because you stay in one place, you're not going to be energetic.
The mindful are always energetic, never lazy.
So those of you who feel like you're lazy out there, use mindfulness.
You don't have to go running or you don't have to exert yourself, just be mindful.
When you're mindful, you can be sitting still all day and still be considered energetic.
Your mind will be alert and you won't fall into the trap of being lazy.
They don't have love for dwellings.
So it's not that they leave them behind, that they have to escape them, but that they have no love for them.
And they will leave, and they're happy to go when it's time to go.
The second part says, like a swan leaves behind a lake.
The swan doesn't worry about the lake.
The swan is not concerned with the lake or say, oh, that was a nice place, maybe I should stay.
Swans, when they leave, they leave.
I mean, swans are just dumb animals, but
In the same vein, the swan not worrying about the lake or not loving the lake or falling in love with the lake or being attached to it.
The swan goes and knows when it's time to go.
In the same way, wise people or those who are mindful, they leave behind or they abandon house after house.
So basically saying, Maha Kaspa has no problem leaving.
He certainly is not attached to... I mean, Mahakaspa was one of the greatest of the Buddha's disciples.
There's some traditions that say he's still alive, waiting to give his robe to the next Buddha.
He entombed himself in the mountain and went into a trance and he's going to stay there for whatever, thousands or hundreds of thousands of years before Medea comes.
And when Medea comes, he's going to come out and give him his robe.
I think it's a Mahayana tradition that says, or it's maybe just an Indian folklore or something.
But he's highly revered.
Apparently, the tradition is, I think, that he aspired once to be a Buddha.
But when he met our Buddha, he realized how difficult it would be and how much better off he would be to learn from this Buddha.
So he put aside his intention.
That was Mahakachayan, I think.
That's a different monk.
I'm confusing them.
But no, Maha Kasaba was the head of the Sangha after the Buddha passed away, or the father of the Sangha is often called after the Buddha passed away.
It's not exactly accurate, but that's sort of how he's looked upon.
So he was a great figure in the Sangha and certainly had no attachments.
But there's a couple of lessons we can learn here.
The first is not to criticize people.
Really not at all.
Criticizing others rarely does any good.
It usually just feeds your ego and helps assuage any
any insecurities we have.
You feel better bringing other people down a notch.
Not good.
And it's often misguided.
People do things for reasons that, if we thought about it, we might be able to empathize and understand why they're doing things.
The person who you're very angry at because of the evil things they've done, well, who knows why they're doing them?
Probably they have evil inside of them.
But they may be doing it because they feel hurt, or because they're in a position where they're not able to understand what's wrong with what they're doing, or this kind of thing.
And often they're doing it blamelessly.
And we get that constantly.
Ajahn Tong, people would criticize him about the silliest of things.
There was one monk who came and saw that Ajahn Tong had all this wonderful food because people, they adore him.
So the food that they would give him is special, extra special food.
And there was this one western guy who ordained as a monk for a short time and
He just was disgusted by it.
He said, what's he doing eating all that good food when here we have to... I mean, I think it came from the fact that he wanted some of the good food, but he just felt it was wrong and unfair.
People criticize things.
Like there's this story of, this Zen story of these Western men, I guess, who became monks.
And they went to live with this Japanese monk, I think Japanese monk, Chinese monk maybe, and probably Chinese.
And they were in the monastery, and every day the, maybe it was just one man, anyway, they were in the monastery.
Every day the monk would bow down to this Buddha statue.
And so the guy started doing it and then every day he saw, every day we had to do bowing and bowing and bowing to this Buddha statue.
And finally the guy got upset about it and he turns to him and he said, look, this is ridiculous.
I don't want to bow down to this dumb statue.
He said, I'd rather spit on that image than bow down to it.
And the Chinese monk turns to him and says, okay, you spit, I'll bow.
Sometimes we hold on to things quite strongly and we miss the fact that it's not wrong what other people are doing.
They have reasons for it.
We have to ask ourselves, this is what I learned a lot in Thailand because I was that sort of way in Thailand, criticizing this, criticizing that.
But then I watched and I saw, especially Ajahn Tong, how uncritical he is and how accepting and how he just doesn't even comment on so many things.
And then when he does comment, he finds the good in it.
He finds a way to focus people's attention on what's good about it, and to point out that, sure, he'll say sometimes, like, you know, some people say this is just a ritual, but, you know, it makes people feel good, it makes people mindful, it makes people think about the Buddha, etc., etc.,
And that really opened my eyes to, yeah, that's it.
I mean, we're the ones with the unwholesome mind.
This guy was obsessed with spitting.
Well, he was the one obsessed with the bowing.
He was the one that got upset about it.
That's the first thing we can learn is to not criticize others without knowing their reasons.
Be careful.
We should always worry more about our own faults.
We shouldn't worry about the faults of others or the things they've done or left undone.
The second thing is this point that I've sort of already made, but it's a two-pronged point.
There's the idea that people who are truly mindful don't need to do any special practice.
And that's very much true.
A mindful person, there's this Zen thing about the Buddha riding in a Ferrari and wearing gold rings and so on, because he wasn't attached to it.
And so this kind of thing,
You know, it's possible to go way too far with this idea.
Because you say, well, okay, so a mindful person doesn't have to do any special practice, a mindful person doesn't attach to things, well then they could have sex and they could drink alcohol and they could do drugs and all these sorts of things, it wouldn't hurt them.
But the point is that the mindful person wouldn't do these things.
I mean, it's not to say that it couldn't happen.
You can be raped or that kind of thing.
And you can drink something thinking it's not alcohol and wind up being alcohol or drugs or so on.
I once...
I was once given these pills by this woman.
I don't know what her deal was, but I don't really think she had bad intentions, but she gave me these pills saying it was like ginseng.
I thought, well, ginseng, that's good for your mind.
But when I looked it up on the internet, I took the pill and I swallowed it.
She gave me this bottle, and she said, it'd be good for you as a monk.
And so I took the pill, I swallowed it, and as it was settling in my stomach, I looked on the internet to see what its characteristics were.
And it was an aphrodisiac.
Like, oh, well, there it is.
I guess that's the only one I'll be eating of that.
But it's true that if you don't have the desires, then it shouldn't affect you.
It shouldn't be a problem.
But people use it as an excuse to do things that they want to do and claim that they're not attached.
Yeah, I enjoy it, but I'm not attached to it, right?
It's a huge exercise in delusion, in self-delusion, that somehow you can be angry and not cling to it or be greedy and not cling to it.
That's certainly not the case.
Anything that's mental, any of your mental judgments, that's where the problem lies.
Anything that makes you afraid or worried or bored or sad.
Greed or anger in its very base forms, they are
and of themselves a problem.
So you shouldn't use this as an excuse to stay put.
In fact, often, Maha Kasaba may have stayed where he was, but he, in the end, went and lived up on the hill, on the mountain above Rajgaha.
I think after the Buddha passed away.
Yeah, that's where he was staying, because that's where they did the first council.
And they invited him down.
They wanted him to come and stay in the city because he was the big monk and he was getting old.
And they said, you know, we need you down here to support us.
And he refused.
Every day he would go back up, walk all the way up.
It's quite a walk.
Every day he would walk up and live up on the mountain.
Apparently he never laid down either.
He was always walking and sitting, never lying down, throughout his life, or his later years anyway, but I think throughout his monastic life.
So it's not like he was just living in the lap of luxury and not clinging to it.
And they asked him why, and he said it was out of compassion for others so that they were able to see the good example, and because it's much more peaceful.
It's just the right thing to do, living in the forest, living alone, living at peace.
There's no sense of that.
But one should not be attached to these things nor criticize someone.
I mean, a lot of criticism, there was this big criticism that went around recently about these monks who had their own private jet and wore sunglasses.
And at first I understood that that was the criticism, and it didn't really faze me at all.
I'm like, okay, well, it's possible that the monastery could have a jet for, you know, it's a bit outrageous, but my point being, those things in and of themselves don't necessarily, because they're tools.
You know, even sunglasses, lots of monks wear sunglasses.
Ajahn Tong wears sunglasses.
Why?
Because he had eye surgery and the light is, or has been, or was, very, very, his eyes were very sensitive to sunlight.
And, you know, I know lots of monks in Thailand who wear sunglasses.
I don't really think it's that great of an idea, but it's not in and of itself a sign of huge corruption.
I mean, there are far worse things that can and probably do go on that we're not really aware of, but
Be careful not to judge things by appearances or etc.
I think it turns out that those monks were selling drugs or doing drugs or had women or this or that.
That's something you can definitely criticize them about.
But it's an interesting quote.
I mean, on the face it's a sign of the importance of not clinging to our place, our possessions, not clinging to be mindful.
But deeper down, and if you know the backstory, it has more to do with the idea that you don't need to be too concerned about going off into the forest.
Oh, how can I follow the Buddha's teaching, living in the home life?
Yeah, it's more difficult.
Yeah, you're going to be tested and tried, but it can be done.
And we should be clear about two things.
One, that it can be done.
And two, that unless we're really, really mindful, it's much easier to get attached.
So you have to be more on your guard, more vigilant when you're living in lay society, when you're living in a house.
much easier to be mindful.
It's actually kind of cheating.
It's easier.
It's an easier way to go off in the forest where we think, oh, going off in the forest, that's difficult.
It's not really difficult.
Living in the forest, there's nothing.
It's just simple and easy and it's wonderful.
Anyway, so that's the Dhammapada for tonight.
Thank you all for tuning in.
Wishing you all good practice and that you all become free from suffering.