Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse number 107, which reads as follows.
Which means,
And one might, and a being, whatever being might, aging parikarchare, when they live in the forest, tending to a fire.
So one might live in a forest for a hundred years.
Ekancha bawitatanang, this is the same as yesterday's verse.
If one should pay homage to one who has developed themselves just for one moment, this puja is greater, greater than the one who for a hundred years practices this sacrifice, fire sacrifice.
Now, not a terribly meaningful verse for those of us who aren't familiar with living in the forest, tending to a fire, but we can generalize and talk about it.
The story as well is quite similar to yesterday's.
It's almost identical.
The difference here is that Sariputta, instead of going to talk to his uncle, he goes and talks to his nephew.
And he asks his nephew, so nephew, his nephew is also a Brahmin.
His whole family, of course, was Brahmins.
He says, what sort of king Brahmana kusalangkarosi, what sort of wholesomeness or good deeds do you do?
And so he says, oh, every month, mase mase ekang ekang pasung.
Every month I kill a, having killed a pasu, a livestock, like a pet of some sort, some kind of domesticated animal or some animal, a sheep, maybe a goat, probably.
Aging paricharami.
I use it to tend to a fire or burn it in a fire, maybe make a burnt offering.
It sounds like he just burns it in a fire.
Kind of an Abramaic sort of practice.
It's what the Jewish people would do.
It's very similar.
But fire sacrifice seems to have originally been burning goats and so on.
all over the world somehow this was a a big thing to do and then he says uh why for what purpose do you for what purpose do you do that and he says oh for the same as before oh for the uh
I have heard or it is said that this is the path to the Brahmaloka.
And Sariputta says, who told you that?
Same as yesterday, same as last time.
And again, it was my teachers.
So, for the first one, for the last one, it was easy to kind of get a sense that his teachers were these naked ascetics.
Last time, right, he was giving, every month, giving a thousand pieces of money worth of food or whatever, maybe even just money, directly to these naked ascetics.
And so one would think that they were probably his teachers who were teaching him this.
Now, in this case the question is, why are his teachers teaching such things?
There's various reasons and we can extrapolate this to sort of generalize in terms of religion.
Why do people teach such ridiculous things?
I mean, it's understandable why people believe them.
We just tend to believe things based on tradition or based on the authority of our teachers, even though we ourselves have no sense of the causal relationship.
So this is why religions do such a wide array of practices, because we're just told to by our priests or by our leaders.
The question is, why do the leaders teach such things?
Sometimes it's just for gain.
I mean, I've seen it even in Buddhism.
People come to the monasteries, the temples, and they ask the teacher, what should I do?
Someone passed away, what should I do?
And I've seen teachers, I've seen monks, you can just see the wheels turning in their head, kind of in a bit of panic, like, oh...
scrambling to find something that looks or sounds kind of mystical.
I mean, it really comes down to that, just making something up on the spur of the moment to appease people's desire for some ritual, something to solve their problems.
Sri Dhammika, a very wonderful sort of populist Buddhist monk and teacher from Sri Lanka, someone asked him about these amulets that monks give out.
And he said, well, they have absolutely no meaning.
But he said, sometimes...
Sometimes for people who are new or who don't really have a good understanding of cause and effect, you have to give them something.
So he took a pen and he says, you see this?
I want you to keep it, hold on to it and it will keep you safe.
He says, sometimes you have to do that.
It's sort of like Dumbo and his feather, if you ever saw the Disney movie.
Sometimes people need their magical feather.
So there is a defense of it.
But
I don't think it's a very strong defense, especially when it becomes one's main, absolutely no defense, when it becomes one's main religious practice.
And not only is there no defense, but it's blameworthy when it involves clearly unwholesome acts.
It's one thing to tell people that offering food to a statue
is going to be to their benefit, or pouring water on the root of a tree is going to do this or do that.
I mean, that's kind of innocent.
And who knows, maybe the angels will get involved and help out with it.
There's this interesting thing.
Buddhists in Sri Lanka are very keen to pour water at the roots of the Bodhi tree.
So they pour water to water the Bodhi tree.
They go around and it's a very important ceremony.
And they do this with the understanding that it leads to pregnancy.
And it apparently has some measure of success.
I mean, it's anecdotal and scientists may be able to study it and find that in fact there is no correlation.
But it's an interesting idea that there might be some correlation because how would that relate to the Buddhist teaching?
It's certainly not a Buddhist teaching that such a thing is possible.
And yet we have in the Dhammapada stories, remember the first story that we did, I don't know if I actually brought up the whole back story, but this guy does basically that.
He goes to a tree and he cleans up around this great tree in the forest and puts up banners and flags and a wall around it to protect it.
and then makes a promise to the tree that if he gets a son or a daughter, he'll come back and pay great homage and respect to the tree.
And sure enough, his wife gives birth quite quickly after that.
So people from Sri Lanka have told me that this actually works.
And I was trying to figure out exactly how it might work in reality because there has to be a causal relationship.
It can't just be magic.
There's no such thing and it's not accepted in Buddhism.
So the idea that somehow you could do some ritual and then it could work.
The only way it could work, and I'm thinking it actually could, is if the angels got involved.
Because there's got to be something to do with angels hanging out at the Bodhi tree.
And if the lay people come to the Bodhi tree and they do this and they make a sincere wish,
and they have a sincerely good heart, it's kind of like the angels can look down and say, oh, those are nice people.
Well, my lifespan is almost up.
I think I'll, maybe they even hang out looking for parents.
And when the angels know that their lifespan is almost up, they try to find suitable parents to go and be reborn.
I mean, something like that.
Somehow the angels, the devas get involved.
But I give that only as an example of how there might be some causal relationship.
But there has to be something like that or else it's just ridiculous.
So for the most part it is, especially.
It's beyond ridiculous when it comes down to killing animals, killing your fellow living beings and saying that's somehow the path to the Brahma world.
So Sariputta rightly says to him, he says, who taught you your teachers?
And he says, your teachers haven't a clue.
And so the reason why the teachers might have been teaching, it may have just been because, you see, if you sound like you know what you're doing, but if you set up all these complex rituals, people think, oh, well, this one, this person, we need him because he leads us in these very important rituals and only he knows the right rituals when in fact they just make them up.
And so I think that's what you get.
I'm pretty sure that's what you get in a lot of the rituals at the time of the Buddha and even after the Buddha.
But definitely very much before the Buddha came around.
Like we've studied these in university when I was taking Indian religion many years ago.
And some of the rituals are just silly, like they take, it seems like originally they were horrific, these horrific sacrifices, a lot of killing.
And so they would take a goat up to the altar and cut its head off.
And there was something about burying a live turtle under the altar and just burying it alive and killing it, suffocating it.
under the altar.
I mean, for no reason.
Why would you bury a live turtle under a stone altar?
But it was an important part of building the altar.
And then there was butter that had to be poured into the fire and that kind of thing.
And it evolved so that eventually, probably with the advent of Buddhism, Jainism, and a lot of the movements that were anti-torture, anti-cruelty, eventually, by the time we came to the form that we study it today,
what they do is they bring a goat to the altar and they have to show the altar to the goat.
Like the goat has to see the altar and then they take the goat away.
There's a sacrificial pole, there's a special wooden pole that has to be there as well and they have to bring the goat and show the goat that pole.
So as long as the goat sees the pole, they've done enough.
Then they take the goat away.
And you can imagine some guy saying, oh, well, we can't kill them anymore.
Well, let's just say, let's just tell everyone, oh, it's enough that the goat sees the pole.
I mean, it's something that they just come up with.
Say, oh, no, no.
People say, well, we don't really want to kill the goat.
Oh, well, it's okay.
As long as he sees the post, somehow that's meaningful.
It's no longer about killing.
So, I mean, good on them that their ridiculous sacrifices have become innocent.
That's one step in the right direction.
The other thing is they, instead of burying a turtle under the altar, they take a lump of butter and they bury it under the altar.
It's a substitute for a live turtle, which is a good thing for all the poor little turtles.
But definitely, innocent doesn't mean beneficial, worthwhile.
And in this guy's case, he's got real problems with his killing.
Every month killing a living being and feeding it to the fire.
Like if it was just butter he was feeding to the fire, then you could say, well, that's kind of innocent.
But even still, it's not the way to the Brahma world.
It doesn't have any connection with being reborn as a Brahma, as a god.
It takes him to see the Buddha, and he tells the Buddha what he does, and the Buddha says, you can do that for a hundred years, every month, and it wouldn't be worth a thousandth part if you were to just pay respect to an enlightened being for one moment.
So again, talking about homage.
And the Buddha specifies my students.
So it is a bold claim.
And as I said last time, it seems like a bit of a biased claim at first blush because anyone could say that.
Well, of course, everyone's going to say their own students.
But it has to be true at some point.
If your students are enlightened and if your people really are, if you're talking about a group of people who really are enlightened, then the Buddha wasn't afraid of making these bold and sort of bragging claims, boastful claims.
Because if you look at it another way, of course it's leaving you wide open
to attack.
And the Buddha fully welcomed what he's saying.
He's really, it's called the lion's roar.
He was really putting it out there.
He's making a claim, a boast, and challenge, it's a challenge, you know, prove me wrong.
It's basically saying, it's claiming something very, very boldly.
And that's really what the purpose and the meaning there is.
That's not the Buddha bragging or to get gain of any sort.
I mean, there's no sense that the Buddha even had any need.
I mean, even if you don't follow Buddhism, there was no real evidence to support that.
I mean, he was well taken care of.
well supported.
But what he's doing is instead making just this bold claim.
that could then be challenged.
And of course, the Brahmin would have to be impressed by that because he couldn't challenge it.
And looking at the Buddhist monks, he would have to agree that, well, yes, indeed, there's something special about many of these monks who have developed themselves.
And so that's what the verse actually says, to one, if you pay homage to one or to those who are of developed self.
So again, not to get too much into it, I think the more important aspect of this that differentiates it from the last one is talking about sacrifice, which I've done.
But I think we can extrapolate that to talk about religious practices in general.
It's not enough that we have a religious practice, and I think there's a lot of this in the world.
Just because something is a spiritual practice or a religious practice doesn't make it really all that valuable.
And certainly an understanding that the different spiritual practices have different values.
So it's not to say that either you're practicing to become enlightened or you're doing useless things.
There are certain religious practices that are valuable, but just not as valuable.
So feeding a sacrificial fire is pretty useless, but practicing loving-kindness, for example, is quite valuable.
Practicing charity,
giving money to the poor is valuable.
It's less valuable than, well, for example, paying homage to one who deserves it.
But even paying homage to one who is worthy of homage is far less valuable than actually becoming worthy of respect yourself.
My teacher said that.
He said,
going to see an enlightened being or paying homage to an enlightened being is not worth the smallest part of becoming practicing to become an enlightened being yourself it's one of it's in a very famous talk that he gave on the force of the force of the batana but yeah he's he
He made that very important statement that, yeah, it's good, but it's not worth the smallest part.
It's far less good than actually practicing to become one yourself.
So it's a matter of degrees.
And that's something for us to keep in mind in our spiritual practice, that some people will put a lot of emphasis on chanting, some people put a lot of emphasis on charity or social work, and it's all about our priorities.
Some people put a lot of emphasis on study, and in the end we have to ask ourselves, what is our goal?
And we have to do those things to engage, put primary emphasis on those things that lead us to that goal.
If we're just giving and giving and giving, what is the purpose of that?
If we're just chanting and chanting or this or that, what is the purpose of all these things?
And on the other hand, if we do have a set purpose and we do things for that purpose,
We have to differentiate between those things that actually lead to the purpose.
But then there are a wide array of things that can help us, that can actually be a benefit to help us realize our goals.
Like charity can be useful for meditation.
Morality, of course, is essential for meditation.
These kind of things.
Study is also quite important.
But putting them in context.
So many religious practices have to be taken as a support rather than a main goal or a main practice, a main focus.
Anyway, things to consider.
It's just some of the ideas that arise based on this verse.
and the importance of quality rather than quantity.
You can do a lot, a lot, a lot of deeds, but it doesn't make any of them good or worthwhile.
You can work for a hundred years, work very, very hard, and have nothing to show for it.
or meaningless things to show for it.
Whereas you can just for one moment do the right thing and have it worth far more than those hundred years.
That's basically what's being said.
A very useful teaching.
Anyway, so that's the Dhamma Fata for tonight.
Thank you for tuning in.
Wishing you all the best.