Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue with verse 215, which reads as follows.
kamato jayati soko kamato jayati bhayang kamato vipamutasa nathiso ko kuto bhayang
Which means, from desire comes sorrow.
From desire comes danger.
When one is freed from desire, there is no sorrow.
From where can there be danger?
This verse was taught in response to the story of Anittiganda Anittiganda is a name, I'm not sure if it was really his name It means one who doesn't have a smell for women, I think
I think it's possibly some kind of colloquialism from ancient India, like we would say when someone has a taste for something.
That's only a guess, but it's based on the story.
Because Anita Ganda, Ganda means smell and Iti means woman.
An is no or not, one who doesn't have.
Anittiganda was a man who lived in Savatthi.
But in past life he had been a Brahma, a God, a being that lives in a realm without sensuality.
So it means in some far and distant time in the past he had developed high states of concentration and absorption and been reborn in these great profound deep realms of existence and had lived there for
Lengths of time that end up seeming very much like eternity But they aren't, of course, eternity And so with the ending of those states of existence One is reborn and he was reborn as a young man He was born as a baby Grew up as a human And as a young man From birth Wanted to have nothing to do with women And hence he got this name
Whenever a woman came close to him, he would scream, he would wail.
When they tried to breastfeed him, they had to sort of cover themselves up and expose only their breasts so that he couldn't see the woman.
Now, I'm not sure how, again, it's just a story, but the, it's quite possible, but the
The emphasis here is on the fact that his life in the Brahma world left him with no sense of attachment to women.
And it may be that, I mean this is what the story says, that he actually had a strong aversion to them.
But the point is that he had no desire for women.
And so his parents tried to encourage him to get married.
And so they would ask him, son, son, please, we want you to carry on our lineage, have children, become a householder.
When are you going to get married?
When are you going to go find a woman?
They knew that he had this aversion to women and they pushed him and pushed him.
And finally he got fed up with it.
And he built a statue.
He created a statue of a woman.
A replica of the most beautiful woman.
And she was just, this statue was the perfect example
figure of a woman.
And so when his parents came and said, son, son, when are you going to find a wife?
He said, look.
He showed them the statue and he said, if you can find me a woman as beautiful as that, then I will get married.
I will marry her.
So I imagine some of the aversion, it probably wasn't that he was homosexual, it probably was just, again, his life in the Brahma realms caused him to break away from the ordinary attachment to sensuality that most people find themselves stuck in.
And so he was able to see the flaws, I would say, in the human body.
And so while everyone else was raving about the beauty, all he saw was the ugliness.
And so hearing of this beauty, he created the statue and he said, look, there is no beauty that I see here, but if you find this beauty, something that is actually beautiful,
this perfect woman, then I will marry her.
So the parents said, okay, well there's got to be someone in the world that beautiful.
Our son is a very meritorious sort of person.
He clearly has some strong qualities of good karma, so there's got to be someone out there who has the same level as him and perhaps has some connection with him from past lives.
And so they
took this statue in a cart and they traveled around the countryside looking for such a woman.
There happens to have been such a woman in a city called Sagara, I think.
And so they brought this statue there and when they went to the bathing place, this woman came and saw her and said, what are you doing out here?
she had just bathed this, there was this young woman living on the top floor of a seven-story mansion.
There's this sort of
stereotype, or I guess it's an ancient tradition, perhaps, of keeping women, young daughters, secluded.
And I think it's sort of the ideal of the perfect maiden, the perfect version, virgin, having no contact with men, having never had contact with men, so she would be kept up in a tower.
I think we hear about such stories like Rapunzel and so on.
Anyway,
And,
She had just bathed this, this was the maid of the house, the nursemaid or so.
She just bathed her care, the daughter, and then went down and went out to the waterhole or wherever.
And she saw this statue and she said, what are you doing out here?
I just bathed you.
And now you're out and about.
And she struck the girl, I don't know, hit her or whatever.
And realized it was just a statue and said, what's this doing here?
And the men who had been tasked to carry this around came and said, what are you doing?
Why do you have a statue of my daughter?
It's not my daughter, my charge.
And they said, your daughter looks like this, your charge looks like this.
And she said, well, to be honest, that has nothing on my mistress.
She's far more beautiful than that.
And they said, oh please, can you take us to her?
And they went and they saw this girl and indeed she was the most beautiful girl in the realm.
And so they traveled back.
They talked with him about their plans and they traveled back and the young man, they told the young man and the parents about this woman.
And in Nityaganda became suddenly
desire arose in him that had never arisen before suddenly this desire that he had never felt when he looked at another woman when he looked at other women suddenly it arose in him this desire he was anticipating always asking when is she coming and they sent a message that she should come in a carriage but she was so fragile and they had kept her so secluded that the story says quite matter-of-factly that she died along the way
She fell ill and died while she was traveling because the travel was just too hard for her.
Simple as that.
And Anittiganda kept asking, when is she coming?
Is she coming today?
And the parents tried to stall him, but eventually they had to let him know that unfortunately she was so close to being united and
heavenly matrimony or whatever.
And yet she died along the way.
And then Nityaganda became very sad and locked himself in his room, I guess.
And the Buddha found out about this and came for breakfast, for food one day and
They fed the Buddha and the Buddha asked them, where is Anittaganda?
And they said, oh, he's up in his room.
And so they called him down and the Buddha said, what's wrong?
And he explained to the Buddha what's wrong.
And the Buddha said, oh, Anittaganda, do you know why you are so sad?
Do you know where this sadness comes from?
And he said, you know, you tell me where it comes from.
And the Buddha said, it comes from desire.
And then he taught this verse.
So there's a couple of things about this verse, about this story and this verse.
The first is, of course, the obvious lesson that it gives us another facet, another angle on the topic of desire, on the topic of suffering coming from desire.
So we've talked about how the striving and the fighting over objects of desire can lead to suffering.
We've talked about the loss of objects of desire.
Here we have the inability to obtain the object of desire, which is again a common theme in life.
people whose ambitions are unfulfilled, whose wishes are unfulfilled, whose love is unrequited.
And we see in the build-up, in the anticipation, this cultivation of desire, day after day, where Anittiganda is sitting at home,
building, you know, day after day this anticipation and stoking up his desire to a fevered pitch until it is finally crushed.
I've heard, I've talked with people who end up quite depressed and quite obsessed with something in the past where they feel was really their chance at happiness.
And they get so stuck on that, that they're unable to free themselves from the cycle of depression.
They feel hopeless and helpless.
Because of course, with the past, you can't change it.
And the more your key to success gets stuck in the past, the more desperate your situation becomes, the harder it becomes to free yourself.
So in all, we've looked at many aspects and it really is a good sort of multifaceted lesson in how desire leads to suffering.
When we look at all these facets and when we look at all the ways in which we could suffer based on what appears to be the cause of happiness, which is obtaining the objects of your desire, we look at all the ways that we do suffer in life based on them.
We come to see that it's not insignificant for us to say that it is fraught with sorrow and danger.
Hmm.
But the other lesson is a little less obvious but also quite important and profound and that is how divested from reality, if that's the correct use of the term, our perceptions of desire are.
We think we desire people and
experiences, I guess, like a state of being married, of being romantically involved, experiences like sex and cuddling and so on, interactions with other people.
We think that these are the things that
we desire.
We think that we are desiring the beautiful shape, the sight, the sight, the sound, the smell, the taste, the feeling.
We think our desire is something, you know, we make some, some idea of desire that is far more, um,
complicated, complex, and perhaps even far more convincing than the reality.
Convincing in the sense that it's easy to make a narrative out of a love affair, right?
It's easy to make this story, if not given in a Buddhist context, would be a great tragedy.
In a Buddhist context, it's a great victory in the sense, not for the woman, but for the man, in the sense that he's come to realize that not only, A, was he still very much susceptible to desire, but also that the desire was on a deeper level than the aversion that he had towards ugliness.
The danger in desire was the of course the potential for loss, the potential for lack of obtaining and so on.
But the
The reality is that we don't crave for any of these things.
All of these narratives and stories and ideas we have of desire, they mask what's the real truth.
And that is that desire is really, in some sense, much more similar to a drug addiction.
Our desire for any kind of sensuality
And you can see this in this story.
He had never seen this woman.
He had a statue that was supposed to look like her, but it's quite remarkable that his desire became so strong
Not that this is surprising, but because it's the sort of thing that we can probably identify with.
We anticipate.
We build up this idea in our minds.
That has nothing to do with the actual liking of what we're seeing, right?
We say that it's this thing that we see that we want, but he's never even seen this woman.
What he was anticipating was the pleasure that he would get from seeing her.
And in fact, probably during the time that he was anticipating seeing her, he was actually already engaging in the drug addiction because his mind was producing the chemicals.
As long as you can build this narrative up
of beauty and of pleasure.
You can feel the great pleasure that comes along with addiction, even without getting what you want.
And so the pleasure had nothing to do at that point with seeing or encountering this woman.
It had to do with him triggering the feelings of pleasure in his brain, really.
The brain chemicals that we become addicted to.
Our desires are not related to what we think of as the objects of our desire.
They're related in a secondary sense, in terms of being a catalyst.
So being unable to manufacture these chemicals directly, we trigger them through this system of habits, where in the past we've experienced pleasure through these things, so when we see them, we're able to give rise to the feeling of pleasure in the mind.
When heterosexual men see women, it triggers something in the brain and they're able to experience this pleasure.
When homosexual men see men, handsome men, they become, or the sign of the man in the body, they become, they likewise give rise to this trigger.
We would say in Buddhism based on habits from past lives.
When dogs see other dogs and they get the sign of a dog, they become...
intoxicated the desire arises in the mind and the pleasure arises
And so this is a big part of why mindfulness is so powerful in helping us overcome not just desire, but aversion and all types of problems that are removed from reality.
Because mindfulness is focusing on what's really happening.
It's focusing on the very building blocks of the experience.
it's showing us or it's allowing us to see what's happening when you see something that you like that it's not the thing that you like it's actually the feeling of pleasure that arises that you're able to give rise to you know if it was the thing that brought us pleasure then looking at it incessantly would always bring us pleasure but we see that that's also not the case
And this is why often it's very difficult for romantic partners to stay faithful.
It's one of the reasons.
Because they become attracted to something else.
Because of course the brain is, the way it works, it's very hard for the same object to give rise to the same amount of pleasure.
And so you need something new, something exciting.
It has to be something that actually is able to turn the switch on.
The mind becomes in a sense, worn, worn away.
No, it's not exactly but it becomes it's like a belt in your car that becomes stretched and no longer works.
And so it's like the mind gets tired of the same old thing.
It's like this is why we feel we get bored of the same old thing.
And so something that you used to look at and be quite excited by and turned on by and therefore pleased by no longer gives you that pleasure and so you have to look elsewhere.
That's why drug addiction becomes worse and worse because the same amount of the drug can't give you the same amount of pleasure.
When we see it with music, why we have to... If music was so pleasant, why couldn't we listen to the same song?
That's not how it works.
You can't listen to the same song for hours and hours and days on end.
You can, but the pleasure won't be the same as the first time.
And so you have to vary it, go back and forth.
And we learn to work with the mind to get as much pleasure as we can by switching objects.
But that's the reality of it, and that's what mindfulness allows us to see.
That's still not an easy thing to deal with, because these addictions are real.
But the point is that we have to recognize, if we want to be honest, we have to recognize that our desires don't come from people and places and things.
They come really from just drug addictions to the brain chemicals.
that bring us pleasure being stimulated in various parts of the body or in any of the various senses gives rise to brain chemicals that are very difficult and challenging to overcome and mindfulness isn't able immediately to do away with these so a big part of our practice has to be patience but a very important first step is being able to see that that's actually the truth and
not simply turning them off, but becoming aware of them, becoming aware that it's not this romantic or high-minded narrative or story of a love affair or so on.
It's merely drug addiction, drug addiction with its many sorrows, not getting what you want, losing what you like, having to compete for what you want, and so on, and all the stories that we've heard in this chapter.
So with mindfulness, we cut straight to the reality.
All of those stories have no meaning.
Seeing is just seeing, hearing.
When you say to yourself, seeing, seeing, you're able to experience the seeing just as seeing.
And it doesn't...
Excite in the same way as before When you have the desire and the pleasure You're able to see that those are actually what the mind is fixating on Whatever can give it that pleasure in the brain and in the mind That's what it aims for And then you're able to focus on those And not turn them off
but slowly, slowly attenuate them.
Attenuate them mainly by seeing.
The main and the deepest part of the path is by seeing them just for what they are.
And the importance there is that what they are is just an experience, that actually pleasure
And this is on a deeper level than any of these stories.
Pleasure is just pleasure.
There's nothing good, nothing bad about it.
But there's desire and attachment.
The liking of the pleasure also has no basis in reality.
There's nothing intrinsically likable, lovable, desirable about pleasure, just like there's nothing intrinsically undesirable about pain.
And being able to see through these is very powerful.
It's what allows us to find real peace of mind.
It's why a meditator, someone who has even practiced the way this young man had practiced, can find great states of peace and calm simply by extracting themselves from that process of addiction.
Now as we can see in another lesson in the story is that simply extracting yourself from it doesn't last forever.
It doesn't solve the problem.
Because eventually when you get in contact with it, something really, really enticing, then you become attached again.
But we can see that from meditation, from mindfulness practice,
That by observing it, by facing it, just like facing pain, by confronting the pleasure, we come to see that there's nothing special about it, not in the way we thought.
There's certainly none of this narrative about falling in love and finding the girl or the boy or the person of your dreams.
There's simply drugs and addiction.
So that's the Dhammapada for tonight.
Thank you all for listening.
I wish you all the best.