Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse 128, which reads as follows.
Na antalike na samuddha manje na pambatanam vivarang pavisa
which means very similar to our last verse not in the middle not up on a mountain not in the middle of the sky
Or in the middle of, not at the end of the sky, right?
Antalike.
Nor the middle of the ocean.
Not in a cave in the mountain.
If one plunges into the cave in the mountain.
One cannot find a place on earth where one could stand and not be overcome by death.
Napa sahaya matyuk.
Another fairly well-known story, part of the Buddha's life.
And it'd be nice if there were more stories about the Buddha's life.
I've talked about this several times, how
Well, that's basically what we're doing here.
We're telling the story of the Buddha's life piece by piece.
But I think part of why several, many people are fascinated by these stories is because they're part of the Buddha story that people have never heard.
And that's because the most famous Buddha stories are not really about the Buddha at all.
They're about the Bodhisattva.
They're about the quest to become a Buddha.
But the 45 years where the Buddha actually taught is neglected.
And this is partly because of the types of Buddhism that have spread and become popular.
but it's a shame because he did spend 45 years teaching and if the stories are any indication, lots of exciting things happened.
One of the exciting things that happened was his son, who if you remember from the Bodhisattva story that we all hear about, the Buddha left behind, some versions say in the middle of the night, and his wife, who he left behind as a prince, eventually became monks themselves.
So Rahula became a novice monk, and Yasodhara became a bhikkhuni.
And lots of the Sakhyans, the relatives of the Buddha, also became monks.
There was Anuruddha and Ananda and Upali and Devadatta, and many, many more.
And they were criticized for this.
But many people were saying, well, this monk is like the Pied Piper.
He's leading all of our sons away.
He's like a cult leader.
Of course, any community would start to get concerned if a religious leader started to take away their young men.
In the beginning, it was all young men.
and just kind of threatening their society.
So the monk came to the Buddha and asked him, and the Buddha said, just tell them that they go forth according to the dharma.
Dharma was an important word for people.
They wanted to follow the dharma.
So it was quite clever, actually.
And when they told people this, these monks go forth according to the Dharma, then people thought, people understood that, oh, actually this is
It was a challenge, really.
And they had to then point out a flaw in the Buddha's teaching, which of course they couldn't easily find.
Anyway, that's not the story today.
Today's story, but the background is there.
That Yasodhara's father, Supabuddha, that's who the story is about.
He was less than thrilled that his daughter and his grandson
renounced the world and he was very angry he was he was quite awful about it and so when the Buddha was when the Buddha was visiting his family when he tried to go for alms with the monks Supa Buddha set up a seat in the middle of the road
in the middle of the street, in between houses, and started drinking alcohol, and I guess with his friends, or just set up a sort of a party.
And when the monks came, he refused to move, standing right in the middle of the road, and they couldn't go for alms.
Somehow he got in their way.
And they said to him, hey, the Buddha has come.
What's going on?
And he says, tell him to go his way.
I'm older than him.
I'm not going to make way for him.
So he wouldn't get out of his way.
And the Buddha just turned around and walked away, made no complaint.
Just went back to the monastery, or went another way.
And Subha Buddha sent someone out, one of his spies, to go and see.
He said, I'll go and see what the Buddha says.
Because he's got more in store.
This wasn't all he had planned.
He's got more plans than this.
So he says, go and spy on the Buddha.
See what he says about this.
Because we're going to use it against him, is the idea.
And when the Buddha was on his way back, he smiled.
And there's several stories where the Buddha smiled.
And the Buddha smiling is not like an ordinary person smiling.
It means something.
And so Ananda noticed that he was smiling and said, Reverend Sir, why are you smiling?
It's kind of perverse.
I want to say that smiling of a Buddha is not
the smile of an ordinary being.
They smile at extraordinary things when something is extreme because it's out of the ordinary, often in a bad way.
He says, Ananda, the super Buddha, he's committed a grievous sin.
He's done something very, very terrible, very bad karma for him to block a Buddha, blocking those people who wanted to give alms to the Buddha.
A Buddha is a fairly special being.
And he made a prediction.
And I'm going to gloss over some of this because a lot of these stories, I believe, are exaggerated.
That might put me in bad graces with some people, but I'm going to, as I've done before, I'm going to exaggerate some of the aspects, at least talk about them.
But basically he says he's going to die and go to hell in seven days.
But he makes a prediction.
He says he's going to fall down the stairs in his palace, and he's going to die at the bottom of the steps of his seven-story palace in seven days, within seven days or something like that.
And so the spy hears this and goes back to Supabuddha and tells him.
And Supabuddha, he says, well, you know, Buddhas never, never, what Buddhas say is going to happen is going to happen.
But he didn't say he's going to die in seven days.
He said at that bottom of the stairs, he's going to die.
So if I don't go to the bottom of the stairs, if I don't go down those stairs,
I it won't happen and he said I'm gonna so I'm gonna what I'm gonna do it's gonna make it impossible for me to go down those stairs and and I'm gonna show that the Buddha is a liar and so he orders his men to lock up to remove the stairs and
I guess he had another set of stairs or something but he removed these main stairs seven floors of them apparently and bar up all the doors and put guards at each of the levels to stop him from going through the doors where the stairs used to be once they were removed
making it impossible.
And he goes and he lives up on the top level and he makes sure that he doesn't go down these stairs.
He tells his guards, if ever I am even thinking about going through those doors, you stop me.
He tells the guards to grab him and stop him.
And
The Buddha hears about this and he says, this is the quote, he says, let not Subha Buddha be content with ascending to the topmost floor of his palace.
Let him soar aloft and sit in the air.
So even if he doesn't stay at the top and never come down, let him fly through the air, let him put to sea in a boat, or let him enter into the bowels of a mountain.
There's no equivocation in the words of the Buddha.
He will enter, he will die.
He will enter into the earth, meaning he will pass away right where I said he would.
I mean, the actual story is that the earth opened up and swallowed him and he was born and held.
That happened to five different people, I think, in the Buddha's time.
Devadatta was one of them.
Not convinced that it actually happens, but that's what the story says.
It may have happened.
It's just kind of hard to believe.
And then he tells this verse.
And the verse is telling something different.
It's saying that you can't avoid death.
But it fits in because it's not only that you can't avoid death, it's that you can't avoid in general the consequences of your deeds.
I mean, stopping a spiritual teacher like the Buddha, someone so pure and so good and so wise,
getting in their way.
I mean, if you read the text, it's a bad thing, but
emotionally or intuitively, you can understand how it would be a bad thing to do.
Pretty hard karma, bad karma.
I mean, karma in Buddhism is like that.
If you hurt an evil person, it's not as bad as if you hurt a pure person.
Hurting someone who is pure is far worse.
Hurting someone who doesn't deserve it, but moreover hurting someone who is pure, who is good, who is...
spiritually enlightened.
The Buddha is just the pinnacle of that.
So that's it for the verse but then it tells the end of the story kind of as an afterthought and it just stops.
It just tells the story and doesn't explain it at all.
It says in the middle of the night
his horse, one of his expensive horses broke loose and was running around the bottom floor of the palace.
I guess that was an open area where the stables were or whatever.
And so he heard this ruckus and he asked them what's going on and they said, oh, your horse.
And so he wanted to catch him.
He stood up and started towards the stairs.
I guess he didn't have another set of stairs.
The idea was he was just going to not come down for seven days.
And at the end of seven days, he would open the door.
But he forgot, of course.
And he got to the door.
But here's where the funny thing goes.
I mean, because he was supposed to have these guards watching.
But when he gets to the doors, I mean it says things like the stairs appear and the doors open of their own accord.
I'm not convinced that that happens, but maybe it does.
I think something you could argue might happen is the angels get involved and they push open the doors.
But, you know, the kind of thing that would happen, not saying that that's what happened in this case, but the kind of thing that would happen from being such an evil, evil person, is that maybe the guards didn't listen to them.
Maybe they didn't remove the staircase.
Especially if they were all Buddhist or keen about the Buddha.
So they wouldn't want to get involved with this.
And it says that the guards actually, the story says that the guards actually threw him down the stairs, which gives me that idea that the guards were probably pretty upset at Supabuddha at this point.
So they actually, the doors opened, the guards threw him down the first and the seventh floor, they threw him down to the sixth floor and he tumbled down the stairs.
The guy on the sixth floor threw him down to the fifth floor.
And they actually threw him down the stairs, seven flights of stairs.
at which point he was swallowed by the earth.
Or he died at the bottom of the stairs, right where the Buddha had said.
And he descended therein and was reborn in Avitsri hell.
And that's how the story ends.
Just like that.
So it's one of those sort of fantastic stories.
Doesn't say too much about the verse.
Except to say that there's this idea that you can't avoid karma.
The only way to, there are ways you can mitigate, you know, like if you have negative karma, positive karma will cancel it out sometimes.
But it does just that.
It's the power of the good karma that cancels it out.
You can't escape the karma entirely.
You have to do something to mitigate it.
or to pass away into enlightenment first.
There's this idea that when you become enlightened and you aren't reborn, all the future results of your deeds don't have time to come to fruition.
But as long as you're in samsara, there's going to be room.
Everything has an effect, that's the point.
I mean, it's like physics.
everything has its power and the power doesn't just go away and get forgotten about you know just doesn't just disappear it it has an effect
And that's a part of, you know, it's a way of looking at this verse.
I mean, the most obvious way to look at the verse is the idea of death.
How death comes to us all and therefore we shouldn't be negligent.
We shouldn't waste our lives.
We should work to do what we can while we're still alive.
Because we don't know when death is coming.
We don't know where.
We don't know how.
We don't know where we're going when we pass away.
But in the context of the story, there's another interesting point here.
It's that the reason we die and the reason death is inevitable is because of the karma of being reborn, the karma of clinging at the moment of death and therefore creating a new body.
means we have to die it's an example of karma of the results of karma that is inevitable it's easy to see the inevitable results of karma but karma in general is like that so he's getting thrown down the stairs was inevitable so we talk an interesting question then is whether our lives are deterministic
And I've talked about this before that I don't think determinism is the right way to look at it because it requires a framework, a universe, a four-dimensional space-time universe.
That's all really up in the mind.
And if you look at the universe in terms of the present moment, then determinism doesn't really, it's saying too much.
And it's hard to get your mind wrapped around that, but that's because we focus on the idea of a four-dimensional reality of a universe existing around us.
So we can think in terms of billiard balls hitting each other and causing effects, cause and effect like that.
And Buddhism certainly subscribes to the idea of cause and effect, but I think it stops there.
that there is an effect of our actions in the present moment, things go according to cause and effect.
But determinism, to be deterministic is to set yourself in the mind with a concept of things being fixed, things existing that are fixed, or are.
yeah, fixed in terms of their result.
So, but at the same time,
What there is, is it seems that it is possible to predict the future, the Buddha is able to do it, and people are able to see things in the future, and the future seems to in some way, I mean maybe a good way of looking at it is that the future is able to affect the past.
That's a way of looking at quantum physics for example, like why when you measure something, does it affect something that's already been measured?
When you affect one thing after the fact, it affects something in the past.
strange things happen so the future may be able to affect the past that kind of not so important for us but what is important is this so so we don't want to go too far in terms of thinking it's all deterministic it's all that's wrong view no question and it's a very bad view to have practically speaking as well because it makes you lack on lackadaisical lazy basically
But at the same time, we have to understand that our actions have consequences that are fixed.
If you do this, this is going to happen.
When you do this, this comes with it.
That kind of thing.
And so how this relates to our meditation?
Well, I've talked about how meditation teaches you about karma.
More importantly, it purifies our karma.
The most important aspect of meditation is it purifies the mind.
And so it prepares you for death.
Death becomes not a scary thing, not a powerful thing.
Death just becomes another moment because you see that we're actually born and die in every moment.
you train your mind you purify your mind you come to see your body and your mind clearly the moments of experience and then you don't have to escape you know we're always looking for an escape or a shelter whether it be in the heavens or in the mountain in a palace
Find a way to shut ourselves out from karma, like Supabuddha tried to do.
I mean, it's just one example, but we do this all the time.
Try and find ways to create security and safety.
You don't need to do that.
Once you're pure in the mind, clear in the mind, you can live on the street.
You can live in poverty.
You can be sick.
you can be injured you can be hungry and thirsty and pain and you can be at war you can be a victim of violence and still be invincible then nothing overpowers you and the Buddha said you actually don't die the funny thing we talk about
You become free from death.
Death cannot overpower you.
Death doesn't overpower the one who is free from the fear of death, free from the attachment to life.
So that's the Dhammapada for tonight.
Thank you all for tuning in.
See you all next time.