Okay, good evening.
Welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we look at verse 202, which reads as follows.
Nathiragasamaagi Nathidosasamakali
nathikandhasamadukha nathisanti paramsukham which means there is no fire like passion there is no misfortune like anger
There is no suffering like the aggregates.
There is no happiness apart from peace.
This is a very popular verse, I guess they all are.
Now this is a very powerful verse.
Nati Santi Paramsukan is very well known.
It's quite a powerful verse.
The story is, again, quite a simple story.
Not much to it.
But it has a lesson for us.
There was a young man and young woman who were betrothed and married.
and were brought together to give alms to the Buddha and all the monks.
And the young woman set about to provide food and drink for the monks.
But the young man when he saw the young woman
When he was just looking at her, watching her go about her activities, he was suddenly seized with a great desire, a great lust, and forgot all about his duties and didn't help her in any way with preparing the food or offering the food.
He just stood there watching her.
And the lust filled his mind.
And it filled his mind to such an extent that he completely forgot where he was in a very sort of somber, well, reverential atmosphere.
Religious atmosphere, you know.
It's like when you're in church.
forgot where he was, and reached out his hand, or hands maybe, he was going to grab her.
And it doesn't say what he was planning to do.
I don't know that he even had any plans.
Maybe just, well, anyway, no need to go there.
And as he did so, the Buddha realized what was happening and stopped him.
They say the Buddha caused him to not see his wife or his betrothed.
And when he couldn't see his wife, he turned and looked at the Buddha and sobered up a little maybe.
And the Buddha said to him,
This is a fire.
You are caught up in a fire, a wildfire.
And then he taught this verse.
So this story is one of any number of stories that exemplifies this verse quite well.
And the lesson, I think, is one and the same in the story and in the verse.
They go together very well.
This verse provides a very good reflection, I think, for all of us.
It's a good reflection on craving and desire in general.
When you want anything,
How much of our lives is caught up in desire, passion?
And how like a fire is it?
And it burns everything and destroys everything.
The Buddha said there's no fire like passion.
But it's very much like any other fire.
It's just so far, far more dangerous and destructive.
It's because of passion that we steal and kill.
It's because of passion that rape is committed.
It's because of passion that we destroy friendships and relationships, committing adultery and
impropriety, giving up any sense of what might be right or proper, even looking at putting a propriety aside.
What is right?
It makes us forget.
It destroys so much in the mind.
It obliterates.
It's like if you imagine that during this ceremony with all the monks and the Buddha and these two, suppose they were both offering quite respectfully, and then a fire broke out.
It would destroy the whole ceremony, the whole procession of events.
And craving does that as well.
It breaks the goodness, the ethics, the wholesomeness.
It destroys propriety and goodness and all other things.
It steamrolls them all in favor of its desires.
When we want something, we'll just take it.
And like any fire, it grows.
Fire doesn't say, okay, you fed me and now I'm full and that's enough.
No, fire and craving like it is not something you can satisfy.
Fire, the more it gets, the more it wants.
The more it gets, the more it takes.
craving is the same, passion is the same.
You become more and more invested in the fuel.
Whatever it is that fuels your passion on you, you want it more and more intensely such that you'll do more to get it.
You need to get more of it, more intense.
until you find yourself forgetting all of the good, all of what's good and right.
And just forgetting really, it's obliterated in your search for satisfaction.
Not even thinking that you're going to be satisfied or not going to be satisfied, you're just blind and
caught up in the fire of it.
It's out of control.
That's what addiction is.
Addiction to anything.
It inflames the mind.
And it leads to dosa.
It leads to anger.
Why the Buddha mentions anger as being nati dosa samakali.
There's no misfortune like anger.
It's because the real problem with passion is that it leads you to want and want more intensely and at the same time makes you vulnerable to displeasure when you don't get what you want.
leads to anger when you don't get what you want, or anger when you're obstructed, when you're given things other than what you want.
Dosa is considered, the Buddha, something quite, it's interesting to say that it's Kali.
Kali is often used to describe misfortune, like an unlucky throw of the dice.
If you throw some dice and you get a bad roll, bad luck, it's Kali.
But it's also used to mean evil in general.
It's used to describe evil, so it doesn't necessarily literally mean misfortune.
But it's interesting that they're put together.
Kali is not a word that you hear quite often.
So I think the sense of misfortune is meant to be retained there.
It's a misfortune in the same way that if you throw the dice, and if you throw them wrong, bad things happen.
You lose your money.
You lose.
You lose out.
Anger causes you to lose everything.
Craving burns it all up.
But as long as the fire is going, there's a fire.
There's something.
You're too caught up to realize what's gone and then when the fire burns out, when the fuel runs out, you're left with the ashes and the ashes are like anger.
You can no longer get what you want and you're left with just ashes.
Anger is like ashes.
And when you get angry,
It's a misfortune in the sense that everything you do leads to suffering.
But it's unlike any other kind of misfortune because if you have bad luck,
Maybe nine out of ten times you throw the dice and you get the wrong roll and you lose a lot of your money.
But you still have a chance to make a right roll, no matter how bad your luck is.
But with anger it's not like that.
Anger can never lead to a good result.
When people fight, husbands and wives and partners fight with each other.
When parents fight with children, when friends fight with friends, or enemies fight over things that they want, we fight out of greed, or even just fighting out of hatred, fighting out of delusion.
And we destroy all good.
We lose everything.
You lose your friendships.
You lose your relationships.
You can lose your life and health.
It's a great misfortune.
The greatest.
There's no misfortune like anger.
Natikanda samadukha is a reminder in the same vein, it's in the same reflection, reflecting on desire, passion.
It's remembering about how the objects of our desire are ultimately just experience.
Khanda, the aggregates, refers to that which makes up an experience, when you see or hear or smell or taste or feel or think.
Every moment of that, there's an experience.
There's the five aggregates.
Form is the physical aspect.
Feeling is the pleasure or pain or neutral feeling associated with it.
Sanya is the recognition of what you see or hear or so on.
Sankara is the reaction to it.
Vijnana is the awareness of it.
All of that is, those five things come together or arise at every experience.
And what it means is that that's all there is.
And so the teaching on why this is dukkha is profound and radical, and it's an important part of the Buddhist teaching, the core part of the Buddhist teaching.
Because what this man is lusting after in his wife is not actually his wife, it's the five aggregates, it's the experiences.
And through his not being able to see that, he's coming to great suffering.
He's obliterating all the good and so on.
But the teaching that the five aggregates are, there's no suffering like them, is a much deeper sort of teaching.
It shows what he's lacking, what he's unable to see.
He's only able to see that suffering comes from not getting what he wants.
Not that the system is unable to grant him what he wants because it's only made up of moments of experience.
Ordinary suffering, we think of suffering when we get a painful feeling or any feeling that's not the one we want.
When we don't get a pleasant feeling, we're bored and frustrated.
We get painful feelings doubly so.
Not only did we not get what we wanted, we got what we didn't want.
So we become doubly frustrated.
Pain becomes our enemy.
And so we understand suffering as being that which we don't want.
And we try to avoid it.
But we come to see that, oh, in reality there is some suffering that we can't avoid.
We can't possibly avoid suffering in life.
It's going to come to us in various forms.
That's what leads people to come to practice meditation.
We see suffering more deeply.
And when they start to practice meditation, because they've seen they can't escape suffering, they start to realize that it's a characteristic of reality.
It's called dukkha lakkhana.
And this understanding of suffering helps the person to let go.
They start to see it's not suffering as a concept, as a reality, as a thing.
as a subject, as a topic.
Suffering is not something that you can avoid because it's inherent in everything.
Meaning, it comes from clinging.
It doesn't matter what you cling to.
It doesn't matter what you crave for.
seeing things as providing you satisfaction, thinking that they're going to make you happy, is the problem.
It's what leads us to suffer.
And as you see that more and more clearly, you come to the moment where you see that not the khanda samaduka, you see that the aggregates experience itself.
It's a different kind of understanding because why I said radical is because it sounds very awful to think that experience is inherently suffering and that's not really what it means, not exactly.
It's on a whole different level.
So this one really, I think,
You can take the Buddha's words literally.
It's not like any other suffering.
Other kinds of suffering, you say, okay, that suffering, I'll stay away from it.
But the suffering of the aggregates is not like that.
It's in a sense a noble sort of suffering.
I mean, you remember that understanding suffering is what we're trying to do as Buddhists.
We're not trying to run away from it.
We're trying to understand it.
Mainly because while it's suffering, it's bad, right?
But more deeply, we're trying to understand rather than, we're trying to change the way we look at suffering rather than trying to run away from it.
There's freedom from suffering, right?
If you think it's just in your painful feelings, you just run away from the feelings.
If you think it's a part of reality, well then you go and practice to change the way you understand reality.
If it's part of all experiences,
then you look deeper at why that is and you start to realize it's not actually the experiences.
To say that there's suffering is not quite accurate.
but they can't satisfy you.
The suffering comes when you cling to anything, when you cling to experience.
And in fact, seeing experience for what it is, is what releases you from suffering.
So by paying attention to the aggregates, you come to understand things much more clearly.
And it's sort of the highest form of suffering, because it's seeing that truth, the truth of suffering, the truth of not being able to satisfy,
And that causes you to let go and free yourself.
Become free from suffering.
Attain or experience a state that is free from any kind of stress.
That is completely peace.
Let's put it that way.
Which leads to the fourth part.
The most famous part of the verse.
There is no happiness apart from peace, which is different from the others.
It's a different formula.
Here we're not saying peace is unlike any other kind of happiness.
The Buddha is actually saying there is no other happiness.
Anything else that you thought was happiness.
The point is I think happiness itself is a bit of a red herring.
It's a bit misleading.
The problem with happiness is you have to like it.
And the problem with any other type of happiness is that it's not really happiness because you have to like it.
If you said it's okay to be happy but just don't like it, it defeats the whole purpose of happiness.
You don't like it, you can't really call it happiness.
That's how our formulation goes.
It's happiness because I like it.
And that's why we say happiness is subjective.
It's what makes one person happy doesn't make another person happy.
Why?
Because one person likes it, another person doesn't like it.
So there are feelings that anyone could say, okay, we all have this feeling and we could say that's a happy feeling, but without liking, it's not really something you would seek out.
It's only because we like that feeling.
So even in meditation, we want to experience good feelings.
We like them and so we seek them out.
But there is an exception.
I think peace
provides that exception.
You don't have to like peace or even seek it out for it to be worthwhile.
It's a better kind of happiness.
The Buddha said the only kind of happiness is peace doesn't require liking.
It isn't involved with liking.
It isn't even involved with feelings necessarily.
Peace is like freedom.
You don't need something to be peaceful.
You don't need something to be free.
You just need to get rid of all the stuff that's getting you caught up and causing you to be unpeaceful.
So this is a good reflection, something when you're caught up in the fire of passion and you really are out of control, remind yourself that this is a fire, you're destroying yourself, you're destroying the mind.
You're cultivating, you're growing nothing, you're not growing happiness, you're growing nothing but anger.
and caught up in things that can't possibly satisfy you because ultimately it's just the aggregates which are unsatisfying.
The only thing that's truly you can say is satisfying is peace.
So it doesn't require any sort of liking to be peaceful.
So, very good verse.
Something we should all maybe even memorize.
This would be a good one to memorize.
and certainly a good one to reflect on.
That's the Dhamma for tonight.
Thank you all for listening.