Okay, so welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse number 41, which reads as follows.
Which means,
Before long indeed, atirangvata, ayangkayo, this body, patuwing atisesati, will lie on the earth.
Chudho, chudho, means discarded, apetawinyano, without consciousness, or with consciousness having left.
Consciousness having departed from it.
As useless as a log.
As useless as a dead piece of wood or a log.
So, this is seemingly a little bit depressing verse, no?
the referring to death, before long we will be dead.
This is a reminder of the negative aspects of life.
So this was told in regards to, it's a fairly famous story and it's a fairly famous verse.
This verse is used
as a reminder of the inevitability of death.
And so it's often used at giving discourses and used in ceremonies in traditional Buddhism.
So the story goes that there was a man in Savatthi
who, having listened to the Buddha's teaching, became very convinced of the Buddha's greatness and the greatness of the teaching to the point that he decided to go forth.
And it says, He gave his heart, or he gave himself up to the Buddha's asana and went forth.
Now, in a very short time, he became quite sick.
For whatever reason, he contracted some sort of illness and had these boils all over his body, kind of like the chicken pox or something.
And they grew bigger and bigger, and I believe it says, eventually, they burst, and he was covered in this filthy fluid.
And even eventually, his bones...
broke, you know, just some horrible sickness that totally destroyed his body to the point where he was about to die.
But he became so vile and putrid that the monks didn't want to take care of him.
So they left him alone and he was lying on his bed in his own urine and feces without anyone to look after him.
Now the Buddha
The commentary here says that the Buddha, it's his nature, it's his way to twice a day to look out into the world around him to see who would most benefit from his teachings.
So sometimes he would look out at the whole universe, looking around through the whole of the earth and all of the heavens and so on.
And then all the way back to where he was staying.
Or sometimes he would start in the monastery and work his way out.
And whoever his mind alighted upon,
as someone who could benefit from his teachings, he would make his way to them and give them the teaching that they needed.
So on this day, or on one day, near the point where this monk was getting closer to death,
The Buddha saw him in his mind's eye and knew that besides the Buddha himself, there was no one else who was willing to be his refuge or who could be his refuge.
And so he headed out into the monastery.
This was in the same monastery as the Buddha was staying.
And he walked out.
And he firstly went to the place where they lit fires, the specially designated place in the monastery for lighting fires.
And he lit a fire and boiled some water.
And he brought the water to this monk's room and proceeded to...
or began to help the monk to wash himself.
And then when the monks, of course, when they saw the Buddha come in, they said, please, let us do that.
And so they helped.
And with the monk's help, they were able to take his robes off and wash his robes and wash him and wash the bed and lie him back down in a clean robe.
And then the Buddha gave him this teaching.
So this is a teaching specifically given to a very sick person.
And you might even think that it's a little bit of a specific teaching, dedicated specifically for someone who is sick or someone who is dying.
I'd like to talk a little bit about this verse and, as usual, how it relates to our practice.
I think it's an important verse to understand.
It's important to understand that it has a broader reach than simply dealing with sick people.
This very short and brief teaching of the Buddha happens to be one of the major reasons why people begin to practice the Buddha's teaching.
So we ask ourselves, what was the use of this teaching at that time?
How is it that this teaching helped that monk?
Because according to the text here, he was able to become an arahant as a result of listening to this teaching of the Buddha.
Just this very simple teaching was enough to set him on the path to become enlightened.
So you would understand that this was the beginning for that monk, just as it's the beginning for all of us on our path to the realization of the truth.
If we think back to the Buddha's story himself, one of the reasons why the Buddha went forth is because he saw a very sick person.
And he realized that sickness was
was something that he himself was subject to as well.
He saw a very old person, he saw a very sick person, he saw a dead person.
And these were three things that moved him to the point of wanting to find a way out of suffering.
It moved him to realize that there was no point in pursuing sensual pleasures or things outside of the body or even pursuing the
the wellness of the body itself, even pursuing life itself.
There was no point in trying to extend life because eventually it would be all for naught.
And so the first important way to understand this verse is as an impetus for us to begin the practice.
Here we have this monk who was feeling useless, perhaps feeling afraid or feeling great suffering and depression because of his sickness, feeling like he was now going to be unable to practice the Buddha's teaching until the Buddha reminded him
of the importance now of putting this teaching into practice.
And this allowed the monk to approach things in a different way, to begin to look at the body and the whole world as being not self, as not belonging to us, and to begin to give it up.
This is how the Buddha began his quest to give up attachment.
And it's a very common reason for people to give up.
give up the world or to begin meditation practices when they get sick or when they realize that sickness, old age sickness and death are an inevitable part of life.
For some people this can be a great crisis, the realization that one day they are going to have to die and all the people that they love and all the things that they care for are going to leave them.
And it also happens to be the beginning of a much longer teaching, which gets closer and closer and closer to a direct realization of impermanent suffering and non-self.
So this is really the beginning of the practice, or one of the important beginnings.
If people ask, why should I practice meditation, why should I torture myself, or why should I be concerned
about the purification of the mind, about understanding the mind.
Why should I be concerned about trying to let go of attachment?
Why shouldn't I keep clinging to these things or pursuing worldly pleasures and so on?
And it's this sort of teaching that really answers this question for us and turns us away from our pursuit of sensual pleasures.
Because you begin to realize that let alone those things outside of us that we might pursue, the things outside of us, even our own body, our own being,
We can't say that it belongs to us.
In the end, this is the meaning of juddho, abheta, vijnana.
The mind will eventually be gone from this body.
this very body, this very being that we hold to be ours, that we hold to be ourselves, this one thing that we cling to more than anything in the world, even this one thing is in no way ours, is in no way under our control.
It's not something that we can keep.
At best you can say we're renting it at a high price, having to feed and to clothe and to care for it, and having to suffer a lot because of it.
So we're renting it, kind of like renting this thing because we think it's going to bring us pleasure or we're trying to find pleasure with it.
Until we come to realize that actually it's not worth the cost of it, that it's actually not something that is going to bring lasting peace and happiness.
It's not something that we can ever fix, that we can never hold on to.
In fact, the nature of reality is that nothing can ever possibly be so.
There's nothing in this universe which, when clung to, will lead to happiness.
The nature of
reality of objects, of possessions, is that they are temporary, that they come and they go, that all of the work that we put into keeping them and maintaining them is in the end
leads to no lasting and sustainable purpose due to the change and the inevitability of losing everything.
So let alone all of the things in the world, this very body that we have is not even ourselves.
The body is really the key possession.
So when we talk about the body as being not self, as the body that's not belonging to us, we also
by extension, understand the rest of the universe, the rest of the world to be so.
When the body is not subject to our control, how could we possibly find control and stability in the things outside of the body?
So starting from here, this is where we begin this movement inwards.
This is the first realization among many realizations, where we come to realize that let alone this inevitability of death, there's actually the inevitability of change on increasingly
shorter intervals.
When I was young I was one way and now I'm older and then I'm getting older.
When our body changes and when we begin to get sick, when we begin to get old, when our physical appearance or our physical nature changes, when the mind changes, sometimes
when we find ourselves becoming addicted to something or attached to something or we find ourselves the mind changing maybe forgetting things more and so on the change that comes in the mind will happen in the body and the mind will occur many times over the course of our lives and
eventually getting shorter and shorter and shorter until we realize that actually this idea of death is really just the tip of the iceberg and actually death is something that occurs at every moment.
This teaching is something that begins us on this course to look inwards until eventually we see that every moment we're born and die.
Every moment things are changing.
There's no
reality that exists more than one moment.
An ordinary person, when they're sitting, for all of us, when we come to practice meditation, at first we see the body as being an entity.
We think of it as being a stable, lasting entity.
And an ordinary person who has never thought about these things,
will even, will generally give rise to this idea that this is something that is going to last, something that I can depend upon.
And they will become negligent in terms of
clinging to it.
They will expect it to be there the next moment, the next day, the next month, the next year, and they will plan things out.
So people will have plans for tomorrow, next month, next year, even many years off into the future.
They have a retirement plan, they have very, very long, you know, having grandchildren and so on, and just plans like this.
And then this realization comes that eventually you're going to die.
And for some people it comes quite quickly.
Suddenly they get sick and the doctor says they have a month to live.
And this is an incredible shock that changes their whole outlook on life.
Suddenly from months or years it becomes days.
What am I going to do tomorrow?
And realizing that
You can't cling to things beyond maybe the next few days or the next few weeks or even months.
That's how we begin to come and practice meditation, with these sorts of realizations, realizing that we can't possibly find satisfaction, that in the end we do have to come to terms with change, with the inevitability of losing the things that we cling to.
Once we begin to practice meditation, we take this to the next step of starting to see the mind is changing from moment to moment, the body is changing from moment to moment.
And even sitting here, our experience determines the reality.
So the reality is not this body lasting from one moment to moment, not even from moment to moment, let alone from day to day, or week to week, or month to month.
It's not that we're going to die in days or weeks or months or years.
It's that actually the we, the body, is something that is born and dies at every moment.
As we begin to practice meditation, you'll begin to see this.
You'll begin to see that actually there is no body.
There is only the experience.
So when you look at another person's body, look at your body, then you see.
And at that moment the body arises as a thought in the mind based on the image that you see.
When you experience the tension in the legs, the tension in the back of sitting here, that's when the body arises.
There's the mind and the body in that moment.
Once the mind moves somewhere else to hearing or seeing or so on, that experience disappears.
And therefore the body disappears.
The body is at that moment gone.
The reality of the body has ceased.
So this sort of realization starts with what is explained in this verse.
So that's really the importance of this verse.
We should understand it as the beginnings of Buddhist practice or as an example of how we begin Buddhist practice.
We begin by accepting these very simple truths of life, that death is inevitable.
This body, anyone who clings to this body has to face the question of...
what they're going to do at death?
Or what is the purpose of clinging when we're going to lose this body in the end?
Why would you worry?
Why are you worrying about this body?
Why are you concerned with it?
Why are you attached to it when it's not obviously going to bring you lasting satisfaction?
In the end, this body is going to lie like a useless log.
It's a vivid image for people who cling to the body because we tend not to like to think of our body as something that we have to throw away.
We try our best to not have to lose the body, to care for it and concern about it.
and we'll be concerned about all the limbs and organs, and if we lose a finger, if we lose a hand, if we lose a leg, you know, this would be travesty.
If we go blind, if we go deaf, if we lose a tooth, even if we lose a tooth, it's an incredible travesty for us, because we cling to this body as being me, as being mine, as being stable.
As the last verse said, it's like a pot, and these verses clearly go together.
They're along the same sort of theme.
that the body is fragile and in the end it's going to break and become useless like a charred log.
Once we begin on this sort of introspection and many other introspections, the idea that habits can change the whole of your being, for example, this realization that craving leads to clinging leads to suffering and so on.
The realization that the way we're carrying out our life is unsustainable.
And in the end we're going to lose this due to the inevitability of things like death and change.
And this leads us inward.
It leads us to approach life from a different point of view.
And it's the beginning of a longer course of practice to see not only that death is inevitable, but that death occurs at every moment.
And that not only can we not cling to things next year or ten years from now, we can't even cling to things in the next moment.
That they're going to change and they could come at any time.
Death could come at any moment.
We don't know what the experience is going to be in the next moment.
Once we begin to practice meditation, we will begin to see the mind is changing, the body is changing.
And this occurs in the beginning, it occurs in terms of day by day, right?
So you come here to practice meditation and today was a really good day.
So you come and tell me about it and you're very happy and then the next day you come back and tell me how horrible it was.
How you can't understand how all of a sudden today was a very, very bad day.
Or today was a very bad day and you're thinking of quitting and then tomorrow is a very good day.
And then this happens again and again until finally you realize that this is the nature of life.
That you can't depend on it.
And then you begin to look closer and closer until you realize that it's first meditation practice to meditation practice.
You can't expect it to be the same.
You can't cling to even a single meditation practice as being dependable.
The next meditation practice might be totally different.
And then eventually it gets to the point of realizing you can't cling from one moment to the next.
And eventually this is how you let go of everything.
In the end you're able to let go of not only your body but the mind as well.
And not be concerned about any experience.
Realizing that the true cause of suffering is our attachment to things.
So it's this sort of realization that sets us on them.
This was the benefit of this verse, especially for this monk who was being sick, was to remind him and to alert him to the fact that this was real and was a serious...
a fact of life that he was going to have to face now and to set him on the right path and help him to come to terms with this and to not be lax.
Because when people are sick, they'll often... We think the correct response is to get sad and upset and cry and depressed and angry and cry out for medicines and...
Or maybe even cling more to happy things and say, well, now I've only got so many days to live, I've got to get as much happiness in before I die, not realizing that this is going to make you cling more and more and be less and less satisfied.
And so for the most part people get depressed and upset because they're not going to be able to cling to the things that they're clinging to.
And so here's the Buddha reminding him that it's too serious for us to be lax and negligent in this way.
Realize that in the end this body will lie on the earth.
It's something that...
we can always come back and think about.
It's something always useful to come back and remind yourself that this body is like a log.
Eventually it's going to fall and lie useless on the earth just as a log.
This is a reason why this verse has become quite famous because it's a good meditation to use to remind yourself from time to time whenever you're clinging to the body or worried about the body or when you find yourself.
Or you can use it to test yourself, to point out to yourself how ridiculous is your love and your attachment to your body as being beautiful and wonderful and a source of stability and happiness and so on.
So just one more verse.
We're going through these one by one and using each of them to give us a little bit more food for thought and explore the Buddha's teaching from one more point of view.
So thanks for tuning in.
Thanks for listening.
And until next time, back to our practice.