Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Tonight we continue on with verse number 80, which reads as follows.
Udakanhi nayanti netika
USUKARA NAMAYANTI TEJANANG DARUNG NAMAYANTI DHAJHAKKA ATANANG DAMAYANTI PANDITA Which means, UDAKANG is water.
UDAKANGHI NAYANTI, they lead.
Netika, the people who lead water, the leaders, or the irrigators, is often translated.
Direct the water.
Irrigators direct water.
Usukara, the arrow makers or fletchers.
Namayanti dejanang, straighten their shafts, the shaft of the arrows.
Darung namayanti.
Carpenters straighten wood or carve wood.
Lead, guide wood.
The word here is namayanti, means to guide or to lead.
The mind is, they finesse it or they work with it.
Atanang namayanti, pandita.
But the wise train their minds.
So we have some fairly powerful imagery here.
And we have one of the more heartwarming stories of the Dhammapada.
And again, it's a backstory, so it has to do with past lives and so on.
There's some that's potentially an exaggeration, and there's a lot that many people will find hard to swallow, but I'll streamline it anyway, so it shouldn't be that big of a deal.
Remember, it's just a story, and whether or not any of it actually happened, it makes a good story and has a good moral to it.
Of course, the moral has a lot to do with giving, which a cynic might say is convenient for monks to talk about giving to Buddhist monasteries and giving to Buddhism.
And I understand that.
I mean, I wouldn't say it if I didn't.
But it still stands, regardless of how important you think giving is.
Giving is good.
So this has to do with giving.
But it has more to do with
one's good intentions.
The story goes, there was this, in the time of Kasupa Buddha, there was a, there was a town or a kingdom.
What was it?
Oh, it was in Benares, Varanasi.
And the Bodhisattva, or the Buddha was dwelling there, Kasupa Buddha was dwelling there.
And so people would invite monks as they saw fit.
So they might invite eight monks, this family might invite ten monks, this family might invite one monk.
But they would invite, their own family would invite a monk to come and eat at their house.
And so there was some kind of system set up for that.
But then one day when they were listening to the Dhamma, one man, who was sort of a wise man, was listening to the Dhamma and the Buddha mentioned the different results of giving.
If you give, but you don't urge others to give.
then the result is that you will receive in the future opulence, but you won't have a retinue, you won't have friends to share it with.
Whereas if you urge others to give, but you don't give yourself, then you'll have a lot of friends, but you won't have much wealth yourself or affluence yourself.
If, on the other hand, you don't give and you don't urge others to give, then you'll have neither.
But if you give and you urge others to give, or you could generalize this and say, if you do good things, help others, are kind, are moral, this kind of thing, and you urge others in the same, then you'll both receive good karma and have friends who will share it with you.
And this man, listening to this, he thought to himself, I'm going to get both of those for myself.
And so he went to the Buddha afterwards and he asked, how many monks are there living with you?
I think the story says there were 20,000, but let's just say it was a lot.
A lot of monks.
I mean, hey, in Thailand now there's got to be 100,000 or a couple hundred thousand monks.
but in one city there were a lot of monks.
And so he said, I would like to invite them all for a meal tomorrow.
And so the Buddha accepted by staying silent.
And this man went back to the town and he told everyone, he said, I've invited all the monks for lunch and I want all of you to help me.
And so he wrote down on a piece of paper, he came on up to people and he said, you know, he had people come to him and tell him how many monks they were going to support.
And he arranged it all.
So the idea was that it would be a single almsgiving as a group so that they could all share in the goodness of their deed together.
As opposed to each house doing it on their own.
And so we went around to everybody and some people would take many, some people would take a few.
Some people would say twenty, some people would say a hundred, some people would say five hundred.
And he went up eventually to this poor man.
His name was Mahadugata.
Mahadugata means one who is greatly at disadvantage or in a really bad place.
dugata means one who has gone to a bad to suffering is in hardship so in great hardship so his name literally means one who is in great hardship so whether it was his name or just a description of him but that's how he is referred to as maha dugata he came up to him and said would you like to help and he said how can I get involved I have no money it's very hard for me to even make enough money to live by
And the man said, well, don't you think, looking at these people who live in affluence and have everything that they want, while doing nothing to deserve it, don't you think that, well, you work hard, so they don't have to work at all, and you have to work hard and don't get anything, don't you think there's a result?
This is a result from the past?
Because they had heard all about karma and how it affects you in the next life, and so...
He said, you're probably right, you know, there's probably a cause from the past for this.
And the man said, well then, you know, find some way.
Don't you think you should find some way to do good deeds?
He said, surely you can find some way to work and to make enough money to support one monk.
And the man was moved with this sort of sense of religious urgency.
And he said, put me down for one monk.
Come hell or high water, I'll find a way to support one monk.
But this man, who is supposed to have been a wise man, made a mistake.
He didn't write down the man's name on the paper, thinking, what is one monk?
I guess it was like, surely there will be a monk left over.
I don't need to write that down.
I don't need to reserve him one monk.
We'll see about that.
Mahadugata goes home to his wife and tells her, and being a wise woman herself, she doesn't reprove him by saying, how could you do that when we have nothing to give?
What were you thinking?
She says, we'll find a way.
And so he goes out and finds some wealthy man who's actually working to provide for like 100 monks or even 500 monks, 300 monks.
And he says, you know, is there any work you have for me?
Well, what can you do?
Well, I can do this, whatever you want me to do.
Okay, then he says, split some wood.
And this poor man goes at it with such vigor and such zest and with such happiness that the master, the rich guy, is really impressed.
And he asks, why are you working with such energy?
And he says, with the fruit of my labor, I have the opportunity to provide a monk with food for a day.
And the merchant, the rich guy, is impressed by this and moved by it, because it's moving.
That someone would really think to work so hard to do a good deed for another person.
So he remarks himself on how special this is.
And when the poor man has finished his labor, instead of giving him his ordinary wage, he gives him a portion of rice, he gives him twice as much as he normally would.
Meanwhile, his wife goes and does the same thing.
She goes to find work with the merchant's wife, actually.
And the same thing happens.
She works with such vigor that the woman gives her twice her pay.
This time she gives her some money.
And on top of that, she gives her some other things as well.
And they're so happy because now they have enough rice to give a simple meal to this one monk that's going to come and visit them.
They get back home, but then they realize they don't have any herbs or vegetables to go with it, any kind of greens to go with it.
And what are we going to do?
And the wife says, go down to the river and pick some weeds, pick some wild plants.
It's not going to be great fare, but what can we do?
This is all we've got.
And so the man goes down and he finds these green leaves that are sort of a coarse fare that no one else would bother picking.
But he's so happy because he has this opportunity to give.
And there just happens to be a fisherman fishing in the river.
And he sees him and he says, why are you so happy?
And he said, I'm giving food to a monk.
And he said, with those leaves, boy, you're really going to spoil him or something like that.
And he says, well, what can I do?
This is all I've got.
I don't have any money to buy anything else to put.
So basically all they had was rice and maybe some milk or some ghee, some butter.
But they had no vegetables, no meat or anything.
So this was what he was going to put with the rice was just some weeds, basically.
They said, what can I do?
You know, I'm not a rich man.
And the fisherman says, well, very well, then you take these fish that I've caught and string them up in bunches.
meaning work for me, and I'll see, I'll help you out.
And so he works for him, and by the time they're finished selling all the fish, there's none left, and the man says, are there any fish left?
No.
And so he says, okay, well, these are the fish that I had left over, and they are some kind of red-scaled fish or something.
Red fish.
and he gives them to him, these four fish.
And so now not only does he have greens, but he has fish to offer to this monk.
At this point, something has to be said about the... You have to remark on how goodness attracts goodness.
This is a part of how karma works.
When you are a good person doing good things, people want to help you, want to get involved.
Anyway, we'll talk more about that after.
So he goes back with the fish and they begin to prepare their food.
They get back to the house, and meanwhile, a couple of things have been happening.
First of all, the Buddha has noticed.
And the Buddha has noticed that this guy has not been written down on a leaf, on the leaf.
He hasn't been written down on the list.
His name isn't on the list.
The second thing that happens is Saka, the king of the gods, the king of the angels, in the heaven of the 33, his throne begins to heat up.
And his throne heats up, it's apparently a thing, that his throne heats up whenever anyone is doing something so good that they might have the potential to overthrow him, to rise up to a state better than him and thus become the leader of the angels of the 33.
Something like that.
Anyway, it gets warm.
So it's not hot yet, but it's quite warm because Saka himself did great things to be born as Saka.
So it's not like he's going to be overthrown by any simple deed, but it gets warm nonetheless.
And so he looks to see who is it that has been doing this great deed.
And he finds out, and he says, this is going to be an amazing thing that's going to happen today.
And so he says, I better get involved.
I better go down and help this guy out.
And so he goes down and he disguises himself as an ordinary person.
And he walks up near this hut where this poor man and his wife live, this poor couple live.
And he says, is anyone looking to hire a cook or something like that?
or are you looking for someone to work for you?
And they say, well, what can you do?
And they come out and they say, what is this?
What can you do to help us?
I can cook.
And he says, well, we have no money to pay you.
And he says, well, that's fine.
I understand you intend to provide food for a monk.
Well, just let me share in the merit, and that will be my pay.
And indeed it will be.
And so he says, look, I'll start cooking here.
You go and fetch the monk.
And so this man is overjoyed with all the help that he's gotten, which is pretty neat when you have good intentions and then people help you out with it.
So he goes to the monastery, and sure enough, he goes up to the man who's arranging, sending monks off, and all the monks have gone off by this time.
And he says, okay, give me my one monk.
Tell me which monk it is.
And the man freezes.
And he says, I'm sorry, I didn't write you down.
And there is no monk for you.
And this guy, he
It says he felt as though a sharp dagger had been thrust in his belly.
Can you imagine?
Just being so worked up about this and pushing yourself so hard.
It's not an easy thing to do.
Most of us wouldn't think to put ourselves out so much just to do an ordinary deed of goodness.
But this was something significant for him.
He'd never had the thought even to give charity.
I mean, being a poor person, why would he have that thought, right?
And so how hard it was for him to come, to just swallow this and undertake it.
And then the work that he had put in and the expectation and the joy that had come with it, only to be denied.
And it's true, there were no monks left.
And he starts crying.
And the people who were gathered in the monastery, they came and asked, what's going on?
And he told them, and oh, they turned on this guy.
And they said, how could you?
How could you?
Because he had encouraged this guy, right?
He had been the one to instigate the whole thing, and then to not even save him a monk.
How terrible.
And they were ready to lynch him.
And so he turns to the guy, and he thinks quick.
And he was quite smart.
It turns out he did have quite a bit of wisdom, just made a pretty silly mistake.
And he says to him, please don't ruin me.
I'm going to be ruined if we don't solve this.
He says, all the monks are gone.
I don't even have a monk for my home.
There's no monks left for me to feed even.
Otherwise I'd give you the monk in my home for sure.
But I can't take a monk from someone else who I've promised them this.
He says, but there's one thing you couldn't do.
Take your bowl.
No, not take your bowl.
He doesn't have a bowl.
Go to the Buddha.
The Buddha right now is sitting in his kuti.
Surrounding the kuti are kings, princes, rich men, and people of all station in society, of high station in society, waiting for the Buddha to come out and give his bowl to one of them.
But Buddhas are wise, inestimably wise, and often show favor to those with the greatest intention and with the greatest need.
So if you have merit, he will bestow this favor on you.
So the man goes up, walks up to the hut
walks up to the monastery.
So sorry, he wasn't in the monastery yet.
He goes up to the monastery, and the people in the monastery, the kings and the princes and the rich people, say to him and said, look, this isn't the time for a handout, because normally he would come to beg.
And so they say, what are you doing here, beggar?
This is not the time to beg.
And he said, I know.
I know it's not time for me to get a meal.
I'm here to pay respect to the teacher.
And so he walked up to the kuti, tears in his eyes, and bowed down on the porch of the kuti where the Buddha was living, paid respect with his head, and said, Reverend Sir, in this city there is no man poorer than I. Be my refuge.
Bestow favor upon me.
And the Buddha opened the door.
And ignoring the princes and the kings and the rich folk, gave his bowl to the poor man.
That's the story.
All of the kings and the princes and the rich people immediately were shocked and
scrambled to talk to this poor man and said, look, we'll buy it from you.
What need do you have for almsgiving?
We'll give you money.
I'll give you a thousand gold coins, ten thousand gold coins, a hundred thousand gold coins.
And he said, I don't need money.
All I need is to give food to this one monk.
And so he led the Buddha to his house, but the king
of the city, followed after thinking, there's no way, there's no way this guy's going to have any food to give.
So once the Buddha sees that there's not sufficient food to give, I'll take him back to the palace and feed him with proper food.
Meanwhile, Saka, the king of the gods, the king of the angels, is preparing angel food.
And we all remember from Anuruddha, didn't we have the story of Anuruddha?
Where we know what angel food cake is like, angel food is like.
So they get there, and of course it's a sumptuous meal, and the king departs, and the Buddha eats.
and other magical things happen that I'm not going to relate.
But through all of the goodness of this guy, this was the guy who was born when he passed away.
He passed away and was born in heaven, yada, yada, yada, and eventually was reborn as Pandita in the time of our Buddha.
It's a common theme in the Dhammapada, to have these grandeur stories of goodness from the past.
It really has nothing to do with our verse, to tell you the truth.
It's just a nice story to tell.
I don't know, it's a little bit, as I said, it's a little bit self-serving in a sense.
Here I am talking about giving food to monks, but...
That's not really the point.
The point is goodness and charity in general, and a person's intentions and how it leads to good things.
But the point is, with all that goodness and all of the good intentions in his mind, he was born as...
This young boy who was seven years old knew what he wanted.
In fact, the story goes that when he was in his mother's womb, his mother had the urge to wear orange-colored robes and go and listen to the Buddha's teachings.
And also to eat redfish, which was kind of funny, because redfish was what he fed to the Buddha.
But she had this craving during her pregnancy to eat redfish.
I wonder if that's, they talk about pregnancy cravings, I wonder if there's anything to that.
But okay, so when he was born, when he was seven years old, he asked his mother permission to become a novice.
She gave him permission and he went forth.
And on his first day, Sariputta was his teacher.
And Sariputta led him into the village in the late morning.
because he wanted to, Sariputta generally went late because he wanted to check and make sure that the monastery was in order, and also because this novice was new, and so he wanted to take him separately so he could make sure that he behaved himself.
But on the way, this is how the story goes, and it's how it relates to the verse, on the way he saw these things.
He saw water,
He saw these men leading water irrigators, directing water into the fields.
And he saw how they could direct water.
And then he saw these, the Fletchers, straightening the shafts of wood, heating it up and straightening it to make arrow shafts.
And he thought that he realized how they work to straighten things out.
And finally he saw carpenters carving wood or shaping wood.
And he thought to himself, these people do this with these inanimate objects.
This is exactly how I should act towards the mind.
At seven years old, somehow he knew this.
And so he turned around, didn't even go for alms food.
In fact, the story says he sent Sariputta on alms for him, which Sariputta did without thinking.
Sariputta was the most humble, humble person imaginable.
It's quite amazing and a good example for all of us.
Here he is, the chief disciple of the Buddha, the number one guy, the right-hand man of the Buddha.
And here's the seven-year-old novice saying, because the novice would carry Sariputta's bowl for him, giving Sariputta back his bowl and saying, get me some food as well.
He told him to get him some red fish.
And Sariputta did it without thinking because he was completely humble, had no arrogance about him.
Probably he would have admonished the novice if the novice had bad intentions, but he also could see that this novice had only the best of intentions.
So the novice went back and was in Sariputta's kutti, meditating, and long story short, there's a little bit more, but long story short, he became enlightened, became an arahant.
And so the Buddha gave this talk in that regard.
He spoke this verse according to Pandita's thoughts on the subject.
Indeed, irrigators direct water, fletchers straighten their arrows, carpenters straighten their wood, but wise people train themselves.
It's a nice verse.
I mean, regardless of the story, it's really a useful one to describe the practice of insight meditation, straightening the mind, or the practice of goodness in general, because all types of goodness straighten the mind, right?
We talk about the crookedness of the mind.
We talk about someone who is crooked, right?
We have this sense that the mind of a person who does evil deeds is not straight.
It's crooked.
And so we talk about goodness as straightening the mind.
Because a good person doesn't have as much complication to them.
It's more complicated when you tell a lie, or when you live by lies, or when you live by deception, or when you live by manipulation.
It's more complicated when you hurt others.
It's more complicated the more you need, the more you're addicted to.
It's complicated when you are stingy.
It's complicated when you are jealous.
It's complicated.
It becomes all twisted and tied.
It's complicated when you hold views and beliefs, right?
This is the criticism we have of other religions, is they have all these unnecessary beliefs that complicate things, that tie them up in knots, trying to describe why this belief is necessary to go to heaven, how you can justify that belief that has no evidence to support it, and so on.
Whereas goodness, pure goodness, straightens the mind.
So this is what wise people do.
They spend time straightening their mind.
Another word that the Buddha uses is tituchu, straightening one's view, straightening the way one looks at the world.
So another aspect of straightening is what we do in vipassana, to see things as they are, to not have misconceptions about reality.
So to not see things that are impermanent as permanent.
To not see things that are unsatisfying as satisfying.
To not see things that are not self as self.
So to not cling to things that are not capable of satisfying.
To learn to let go and to
flow with life, not get stuck on things.
So that's the teaching.
Not much more you can say about it, except that's what we're doing is straightening our minds with all of the cultivation of goodness that we do.
And so this is the goal that we have.
When we think about Buddhism, the Buddhist teaching, we should really think in terms of this straightness, goodness, rightness, knowledge and wisdom, and being in line with the truth of reality.
Because once you see things as they are, then there is no potential for
crookedness, for evil, you see that it's a complication.
You see that the evil and unwholesome things are just making life more difficult for you, are just leading to more stress and suffering.
And when you learn to let go and free yourself, you free yourself from suffering.
Untie the knots.
Anto jatabahijatajataya jatitabajah.
With the inner knots and the outer knots, this generation is entangled up in knots.
Who indeed will free themselves from this tangle?
So it's through the practice of morality, concentration, and wisdom that we untangle the tangle and free ourselves from crookedness.
training our minds, just like people train inanimate objects.
If they can do it with inanimate things, why can't we do it with the mind?
That was the novice's reasoning at seven years old.
So it should put us all to some shame and make us think, why am I not having such profound thoughts?
Why am I not engaging in the practice that leads to straightness of mind?
And we should undertake it in earnest.
So that's the Dhammapada teaching for today.
Thank you all for tuning in.
Wishing you all a great practice and progress on the path to peace, happiness, and freedom from suffering.
Thank you.