Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse number 97, which reads as follows.
Asadho akatanyuja santi chedho jayonaro hatavakaso vantaso save uttama poliso Which on the face means
one who is faithless, asadho, akatanyu, one who is ungrateful, sandhichedo, a robber, someone who breaks into other people's houses, chayonaro, whatever man or person, hatavakaso, has destroyed opportunity, has opportunity cut off,
Vantaso is hopeless.
Saue utama poriso.
Such a person is the height of humanity.
So, a rather odd verse coming from the Buddha.
But you have to understand the context.
And then we'll explain that on face value it means one thing.
But when you understand the context, and when a person looks at the Pali words, it means something quite different.
So the story is again about Sariputta.
And it's in regards to 30 monks who had been dwelling in the forest.
intently practicing meditation, and the Buddha somehow saw that they needed something.
They needed perhaps to move away from faith, one might think, based on the story.
The Buddha anyway saw that they needed some push, and if they were given a push in the right direction, it might put them back on the right path and lead them to become enlightened.
he saw potential in them.
And so he used Sariputta as his catalyst by asking Sariputta a question when they were in his presence.
So these monks came to the Buddha, pay respect, the Buddha decided how he was going to teach them.
He turned to Sariputta and he says, Sariputta, do you have faith
Do you believe, basically, do you believe that the faculty of faith, when cultivated, when made much of, leads to the deathless and ends in the deathless?
and asked about all five of the faculties.
It's not just the faith faculty, but there are five faculties.
There's saddha, which is faith or confidence, vidya, which is effort, sati, which is mindfulness, samadhi, concentration or focus, and banya, which is wisdom.
So he asked about these five faculties, but he asked, do you believe?
And Sariputta gave a sort of a nuanced reply.
He didn't just say yes or no.
He said, it's not out of faith.
He said, I don't get to that out of faith in the Blessed One.
as in regards to the faith faculty being, when cultivated, leading to Nibbana, and same with the effort faculty and the mindfulness faculty and the concentration faculty and the wisdom faculty.
He says, but, so basically he says, I don't go to faith in that regard, faith in the Blessed One in that regard.
That's a Pali way of saying, I don't have faith in the Blessed One in that regard, or it can be interpreted to mean that.
And he said, but someone who has not seen the truth, who has not come to realize the truth for themselves, such a person would have faith in the Blessed Oneness.
They would have faith in someone else.
Or would get to this by faith in someone else.
So I don't go to faith in the Blessed One.
I don't get to that through faith in the Blessed One.
And as Buddhists, we tend to understand what he meant, like it's not out of faith, because he says for someone who has not seen, not understood for themselves, they need to have faith.
So it's actually pretty clear, but the Pali somehow makes it ambiguous, and these 30 monks
again with the criticism, start talking amongst themselves and saying, even Sariputta, it's amazing, he hasn't given up his wrong views, he's still faithless.
He has no faith in the Buddha.
He still, after all this time, doesn't have this faith in the Buddha.
It's a valid criticism.
I mean, it would be if they hadn't misunderstood what he was saying, if he had actually meant that.
He just had no faith in the Buddha whatsoever.
But of course the Buddha hears about what they're saying and says, monks, what are you talking about?
And when they tell him, he explains to them.
He says, but Sariputta, when I asked him, he answered me quite clearly.
And what he meant was that it's not out of faith, it's through understanding.
And because he has seen the truth through the practice of Samatha meditation, Vipassana meditation, has realized the path and fruition,
It doesn't require faith.
It doesn't get there through faith in another.
It gets there through his own knowledge.
And then he said this verse.
And so what's interesting about this verse is it confuses them even more, right?
He says, someone who is faithless is the best, is the height.
And the meaning is they don't have faith.
They don't require faith to know the truth.
such a person who has seen the truth for themselves and no longer requires, no longer has to believe, right?
So you tell them the truth and they can verify or deny it.
They can verify the truth without requiring belief.
You can say, it's like this, they don't have to believe you.
They know it is the truth.
It's better, obviously.
and then he goes on to confuse them more or play with them more he says literally means one who it literally means one of two things but means not means done and means one who knows
So it usually means one who knows not what was done in the sense of knowing not what someone else has done for you.
So if I do you a favor and you don't keep that in mind, you aren't conscious of the fact that something's been done for you.
It's a way of saying you're ungrateful.
Akatanyu is a common word that means, it's a compound that means someone who is ungrateful for the things other people have done for them.
It can also, and the Buddha is using it here in a different way, it means one who knows that which is not done.
Akata anyu.
Akata means what is not done, or what is not made, the unmade.
And the unmade here is nibbana.
So it's a play on words that is, of course, lost in the English.
But akata anyu means one who knows nibbana.
Sandhi cheda literally means one who has cut the chain.
Sandhi means the connection or the chain.
And it is a word, it is a compound that was used to mean one who breaks into people's houses, cutting through the locks.
uh the the lock on the door but here is someone who has picked the lock on samsara and unlocked or broken the chain it's more correct broken the chain of rebirth so being born all sick and dying is a chain and so one who has who has broken that it's one who is free from samsara
one who has destroyed opportunity or has had opportunity cut off, means one who has no opportunities for them.
That's what it normally would mean.
But here it's a specific meaning.
Again, it's a play on words, but it means
One for whom there is no opportunity for further becoming.
So opportunity is in a sense another word for becoming this or becoming that.
They don't have ambitions or plans because they don't think about the future.
And finally, wantasso means hopeless.
And hopeless is, of course, a very good thing.
It's an excellent thing to be hopeless.
It means you have no hope.
You don't hope for anything because you have no expectations.
No expectations, no desires.
You are living in the future again.
You are living only in the present, perfectly flexible and content no matter what happens, no matter what comes or doesn't come.
So this is the meaning of Buddha said, that way uttama puri.
So such a one is indeed the height of humanity.
So what does this mean for our practice?
Well, first, before we actually get into the context, in the story, the Buddha talks about the five faculties, which in and of themselves are a really good teaching.
This is a teaching that has been taken from the Sanyuta Nikaya, and it's an important teaching.
We have the concept of these five faculties and talk about them in the meditation practice.
You have to balance confidence with wisdom.
and cultivate them both, but in tandem.
So if you have too much confidence, not enough wisdom, that's a bad thing.
If you have a lot of wisdom, but you don't have any confidence in it, so you know a lot of things, it's not really wisdom.
But without the confidence, you're always doubting the things that you learn and the things that you come to understand.
Did I really see that?
Is this really useful?
Effort and concentration also have to be balanced.
So if you have a lot of effort, you'll become distracted without enough focus, if the effort isn't focused enough.
If you have a lot of focus but not the effort, you'll fall into a stupor and you'll become tired and fall asleep.
So these two have to be balanced as well and they both have to be cultivated.
Now sati, sati is the ability to see things as they are basically, to recognize reality.
Sati means to recognize or to remember, to remember yourself, I mean to remind yourself.
the ability to see things and to recognize things as they are without any kind of extrapolation, not seeing things as good or bad or so on.
So mindfulness is actually what balances the other faculties because you don't get off in one way or another.
You don't get caught up in too much energy, too much concentration.
You become natural.
You just let things sort themselves out without forcing anything.
So absolutely these five, when they work together and when you use mindfulness to balance the other four, are definitely the path to the deathless.
And by the deathless is meant this freedom from the rounds of rebirth, freedom from being born again.
The only way to not die is to not be born.
And so if we're born again and again and again, we'll always have to die again and again and again.
So deathless just means that state of freedom from that.
That's the first lesson.
Second lesson, of course, again, this lesson criticizing others can be a dangerous thing to do if you're not clear.
But on the other hand, these 30 monks were provided the perfect opportunity for the Buddha to teach the Dhamma.
So there is that.
When something is unclear and when something appears to be wrong, it is important not to keep quiet and think, oh, well, I don't want to stir up the boat.
It is important to bring it up and ask why.
Why is it like that?
Why does it seem like this monk is faithless?
And then when we get into the actual verse, we have some important things to say, I think.
Asado is really an important point.
It's a difference between Buddhism and other religions.
It doesn't mean that you shouldn't believe anything.
it just means that belief believing in something is inferior to knowing it for yourself and buddhism will always hold it to be so whereas other religions believe that faith is ultimate they believe there are certain things that you can't know that it is somehow important to have faith in and so they set up this system whereby you cultivate faith and you have to work hard to cultivate it because
Faith is not something that is stable, not like wisdom, or not like mindfulness, not like awareness.
Faith is something, well, not like wisdom actually, because wisdom is stable.
When you come to see things clearly, you don't have to work to maintain it.
It's something that is stronger and
Whereas with faith, you have to push and push, and you have to always be repressing your doubts.
Or you could say faith that comes with wisdom, when they're both balanced.
The faith that comes with wisdom.
Because in fact, you could also say that Sariputta has perfect confidence in the truth.
He has perfect confidence in the things that the Buddha was asking him.
The answer is yes, and he has perfect confidence in that.
But it's faith that's based on wisdom, based on knowledge.
And so again, how you have to balance them
But the Buddha was fairly critical about the idea of people who just take things on faith, which it was a big thing in the Buddha's time as well.
The Brahmins were big on faith.
They believed that their rituals had some higher meaning to them without any rational explanation, or they believed in this god or that god without having seen or heard.
They believed in Brahma.
So they created all these beliefs, and then they just had faith in them.
They didn't have any knowledge or understanding about their truth or falsehood.
So in meditation this should be our emphasis, not on believing that somehow this meditation is going to help us, but in using the meditation to learn about ourselves, so that we don't need faith, we don't need to believe anyone else.
That's really what we're doing.
You want I can tell you all about the mind, how the mind works and what reality is like, I can give you lecture after lecture.
But that's always going to be inferior to you actually opening up the box and looking inside, which is what you do in meditation.
You open up and you look and you see how are things going on.
The technique that we give you is just to provide you with a framework, like a tool,
in which to look like when you peer into a microscope we give you this and you look in the microscope and whatever is there you'll see so watching your stomach rising and falling as you watch it and you use the mantra to keep yourself objective you'll start to see things you'll be in an objective frame of mind like you're focusing the microscope and once you get it well focused you'll be able to see things as they are and then you won't need to believe me
Akatanyu is about what this is all about.
The height, the pinnacle, is to see that which is not made or to know that which is not made.
The point being that as you look in this microscope through the meditation, what you're going to see is that everything that arises ceases.
And you'll come to the realization or the understanding that there's nothing in the world that is truly and intrinsically of value.
There's no experience that you can have, no goal you can attain in the world, because everything is made by causes and conditions.
It arises and it ceases, and it's a part of a web of causation.
Now Nibbāna or this, there is that which is outside of this cause of causation.
It doesn't arise and therefore it doesn't cease.
So this is considered to be the height.
When someone realizes this, it's unique.
They have this experience of some unique state or unique entity or unique reality that is unmade.
that is unformed, unborn.
So that is the height.
It's something that changes the way we look at reality because in contrast everything else becomes meaningless.
And when one who has realized this or seen this, they'll never be enticed by or intoxicated by those things that arise and cease because they're clearly categorically inferior.
Sandhicheda means cutting the link.
So another great thing is one doesn't have to be born old, sick, and die again.
Most humans are fairly much attached to life, and if you ask them, would you like to come back and do this all again and again, many would, I think, say yes, please.
It would give me an opportunity to learn more and to experience things I didn't experience in this life.
It would be great to come back.
forgetting as we do.
We have this confirmation bias or positive bias.
So we're very quick to forget about all the problems in life.
And moreover, when you think it through, what you're talking about is an infinite recursion, right?
You're talking about this infinite cycle.
And so it's that that is fairly problematic because it really becomes meaningless after a while and it ends up being
not nearly as much trouble as it's worth.
Being a human being is a lot of trouble.
And clearly, in all the time we've spent in the rounds of rebirths, we keep coming back to things like this.
We go up and down, and so sometimes it's great, and sometimes it's horrible.
Sometimes it's mind-numbingly painful and cruel and unpleasant.
Sometimes it's pleasant, incredibly stupefyingly pleasant.
But in the end, it's just a round of rebirth again and again.
And in the end, it's completely unsatisfying.
It's not something that you intellectually or let go out of faith.
You don't have to believe me.
The point is that when you look closely, you naturally incline away from it.
So through the meditation, you become less inclined to create, less inclined to chase after this pleasure because it's a lot of work.
And then you have it and then it disappears and you're left with nothing except your attachment to it, which then leads you to lots of suffering.
So cutting the chain, this is the part of the goal.
And again, with the theme, it just goes back to knowledge, not belief.
It's not something to be afraid of.
You can't just fall into it.
Most people, I think, are afraid of the idea of nibban, or some kind of...
unknowable, mysterious state of so-called freedom.
But when you've experienced it, there's no question in the mind which is preferable.
The mind lets go immediately of those things that are completely unbeneficial and unsatisfying.
Hatawa kaso means they've given up the opportunity for becoming and this has to do with giving up defilements.
It means giving up all kinds of unwholesomeness but also any kind of wholesomeness.
So giving up the desire to even do good in the world, to bring the world to good, to save the world, to change the world.
All of these things one eventually gives up and that's considered preferable because in the end you can't change the world, you can't fix the world.
In the end, everything that you've done in the world will cease and fade away.
Over time, in the face of eternity, it's really nothing.
You want to save the planet, save the environment.
To some extent, that's a good deed.
It's kind of you to think about other people and to think about society and want everyone to be happy, so it's good.
And for most of us, it's a great thing.
For someone who becomes enlightened, they give up any idea of fixing things.
Because in the end it's inherently broken.
Of course along the way they do a lot of good and by becoming enlightened they also do a lot of good and end up making the world a better place for everyone because they give up their own greed, their own attachments, their own conflicts and anger and their own arrogance and conceit and so on.
So there's really nothing to criticize about it.
But they certainly give up everything.
They have no opportunity for this future becoming, no more ambition.
And want us so they are hopeless.
So our practice is to give up our hopes.
Because if you hope, it means you still have a goal.
And when someone becomes free from suffering, when they attain the ultimate goal, then there's no other reason for them to hope or wish.
They say that hopes and wishes are actually a cause of suffering, because even if you get what you want, get what you wish for, you'll at the same time be giving rise to attachment to it.
And then you build up and build up the attachment until eventually that goal is attained and lost over time, at which point all you're left with is the attachment, which again leads to suffering.
So this is an explanation of that verse and sort of an outline of the sorts of qualities of an enlightened being.
For our own practice we emulate some of these and we cultivate some of these and we keep some of them in mind philosophically to help us know how to direct our minds in the meditation practice.
Another useful if a bit, I would say tongue-in-cheek.
I don't really want to implicate the Buddha in any way, but it's definitely a clever verse, meant perhaps, it seems, to shock and to throw off guard the listener.
So that's the verse for tonight.
Thank you all for tuning in.
Wishing you all the best.
Be well.