Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verses 133 and 134, which read as follows.
Mā voca paruṣaṁ kañcī uttā pativadayutam dukhāhi sāraṁ bhakathā patidandā puseyat puseyutam
Which translate roughly as Do not speak harshly to anyone
having been spoken to, they may speak back to you.
They may reply in kind.
Dukkha hi sarambha katha.
Angry words are painful.
Patidharndha puseyutang.
And you may be struck
may come to blows you may be struck as a result or maybe hit in return may lead to violence perhaps if you can keep yourself still like a broken bell or a broken gong
This is the way you will attain Nibbana.
And there will be no anger found in you.
So this has to do with harsh speech.
And the origin story is relatively long compared to the some of the stories recently have been fairly short.
Don't have to go into all the detail.
But briefly to sum up, there was a monk called Kondadhana.
And
Everywhere he went, he was followed by a vision of a woman.
So quite curious, whenever he would go for alms, people would see this woman following behind him.
And they would say, here's a portion for you, and here's a portion for your lady friend.
And he never saw this woman.
He would turn around and see no woman.
But everybody else saw this woman.
And so word kind of got around.
And the monks got upset.
But it tells a story of how this happened.
So in ancient, and the story is actually somewhat interesting.
I mean, it's all quite fanciful.
I mean, for a modern skeptical audience, I think there's a lot of distrust of these sort of magical type tales.
How could there be this woman?
Well, the story goes that in the time of Buddha Dighayu,
one of the past Buddhas in another age, in another universe perhaps.
Why does it say Dighau or Kasapa?
I don't know, Kasapa or Dighau.
Anyway, there were these two monks who were so close, it was as though they were brothers.
They would do everything together.
They were the best of friends and the closest of companions.
And so they would always come out and come out together, go for their meals together, go to meetings together.
Meditate together, that kind of thing.
And it happens that there was an angel, a goddess, a female angel somehow, who saw them and thought to herself, I wonder if there's a way that I can split these two up.
Listen carefully, this gives some insight into the true nature of the divine.
Many other religions worship or pray to or expect protection from angelic beings.
Well, it's not always their inclination.
So this, just on a whim, this angel thought, I wonder if I can split these two up.
And so one day when
When they were walking along the highway or the forest, one of the monks said, hold on, I've got to go use, go, how do you say, attend the needs of nature, I think it says in the English.
He had to use, he had to pass water, he had to urinate.
And so he went off into the bushes.
And as he was coming out, this angel appeared behind him.
as a beautiful woman half naked and adjusting her robe and fixing her hair as if coming out of the bush that the elder had just been in and the other monks saw this and immediately suspected the worst and the first monk accused him of
of breaking the discipline, accused him of having intimate relations with the woman, and the other monk denied it, of course, and they ended up completely splitting.
And this monk went before the other monks and accused him, and all the monks interrogated this other monk who denied it all.
So they couldn't come to a decision over it, but completely destroyed their friendship.
Now this angel realized and began to feel the effects of how evil it was, the thing that she had done.
She wasn't malicious, she was just somewhat deluded and perhaps impetuous or careless, intoxicated perhaps in her powers and her own greatness.
But she felt terribly guilty and so she went down and told the monk, the monk who had accused, the second monk who had accused the first monk, told him what she had done.
And this monk believed her but they say it didn't ever fix their
their friendship.
They ended up never becoming friends, fast friends again because they couldn't.
It was like the first one felt like the other one had betrayed him by believing such a thing could be possible.
So those two monks were reborn according to their karma.
The goddess was born in hell
and suffered there for a period of an interval between two Buddhas, was born as a man, and eventually became our protagonist or antagonist, the namesake of this story, Kundadhana.
Became a man, was born a boy, and grew up and became a monk,
But everywhere he went, this woman followed him.
And so the monks were really upset about this and thought, we've got to do something because everyone's starting to talk and they're going to think that we let women follow us around.
This monk is going with a woman.
So they went to Anattapindika, who was the donor of the monastery, and they said, look, you have to kick this monk out.
Really, I'm not sure why they would do this, because the Buddha was there, but
I've seen this happen before where monks go to lay people trying to solve the monastic problems.
But Anathapindika was having none of it.
He said, well, isn't the Buddha in Savatthi?
He said, well, the Buddha will know what to do.
He did nothing.
So they went to Visakha, who was the other chief lay disciple.
She also did nothing.
So finally they went to the king for some reason.
and they told the king about this that there was this monk who who had a woman following him around everywhere he went and the king should do something about it and the king of course being just an ordinary worldling was taken by their words and went to the monastery and brought some men and surrounded this monk's hut and ordered him to come out and the monk looked out and saw the king and so he went
And the elder came out and the king immediately saw that there was a woman behind this monk.
And so the elder, when he saw the king, he went back in and sat on a seat, and when the king went in, didn't see the woman.
And so he looked everywhere, he looked under everything, in all corners of the room, up in the rafters, everywhere, couldn't find this woman.
He said, where is she?
Where is who?
The woman.
And this goes on, and eventually he figures out that it's just some kind of strange phantom phenomenon.
And so he says, you know, look, because he takes the monk out, sees the woman, brings the monk back in, doesn't see the woman, he says, it's not real.
And so he tells the monk, he says, look, you're always going to have this trouble if this keeps happening, so you come to my home for alms.
You come to the royal palace for alms.
And the other monks found out about this and they were incensed.
They said, you know, not only is this
monk corrupt, but now the king is corrupt as well.
And so they were bad mouthing the king and bad mouthing this monk.
And they came up to this monk and said, so now you're the king's bastard, they said.
And the monk, fairly reasonably, although wrongly, became incensed at these monks and shot back at them, you're the ones who are corrupt, you're the bastards.
You consort with women, you're the ones who have women.
So he said all these things that weren't true.
and these monks were shocked and they went to see the Buddha and they told the Buddha this and the Buddha called this monk to him and asked him if it was true
Yes, it's true.
Why did you do that?
Well, because they said these things to me.
Well, but they were saying these things because of what they'd seen.
Now, did you see them consorting with women?
Do you see them?
Do you have any reason to say these things?
He says, no, actually, I just made that all up, right?
And the Buddha said, for you, this bad thing has happened to you because of things you've done in your past life.
It's something that you have to bear with.
And so then he told this verse.
He said, don't speak harshly.
The story is interesting and it provides a little bit of interesting context.
The general sort of philosophical topic here is about misconception and what sort of misconception is important and what sort is not.
If you see these monks who saw this woman behind the monk, then they had no reason to doubt it.
Their claim that this man was being followed by a monk was wrong, but reasonable.
It was, in an ultimate sense, on an ultimate level, it was justified.
But this is the monk's misunderstanding.
The monk's wrong.
It doesn't even seem like a misunderstanding.
It seems like he premeditated.
His misunderstanding wasn't in terms of these other monks being bastards or being followed around by women or associating with women.
He knew that was not true.
But still it's a misunderstanding, you see.
But it's a deeper misunderstanding.
It's a misunderstanding that somehow saying these words, getting angry even, is somehow the right answer.
That there's some benefit to these things.
This is fairly important because Buddhism still considers all evil to come from misunderstanding.
You don't just get angry.
You get angry because you think somehow that it's good to get angry.
You don't understand anger.
It's crucial because our ordinary way of dealing with anger, when we feel that it's wrong, is to suppress it.
Same with greed.
When you want something, the only way to deal with that is to suppress your urge.
So we believe the anger is wrong.
The root is the anger.
It's not.
The anger isn't the root problem.
The greed isn't the root problem.
The root problem is you don't understand greed.
You don't understand anger.
You don't understand the things that you're getting greedy and angry about.
When you want something, it's because you think it is stable, satisfying, controllable.
When you dislike something, it's because you feel like you can make it stable.
You can change it to be stable, satisfying and controllable.
And only when you see, when you see clearly, when you come to see the truth about this, because we don't really know about the other set of monks, whether they had a reaction to these things.
So they had this experience where they saw this woman or they even heard about this woman following the monk around.
It says they actually saw it.
But we don't know what their reaction was, if their reaction was neutral and objective, or whether their reaction was angry.
But it's reasonable.
And their misunderstanding was only in an abstract sense, in terms of concepts.
So the concepts, they got the concepts wrong.
They thought this was a real woman, when in fact it was just a phantom woman.
But in an ultimate sense, they were saying it was factual.
This monk appears to be followed around by a woman.
And so how this relates in general to all of us, because I don't think these circumstances are all that common,
But obviously the general circumstances of finding yourself being accused wrongfully, finding yourself being abused, finding yourself being manipulated or taken advantage of, finding yourself being unfairly treated.
Now sometimes it's with reason, sometimes justified.
Sometimes you really are being unfairly treated.
Sometimes there's malicious intent.
But sometimes there's not.
And, well, I mean, and whether there is or there isn't actually is not the important and most crucial aspect.
I mean, if you know you're being wrongfully treated, this monk should have, you know, he was fully in his right to say, I'm not being followed by a woman.
That's what he did in the beginning.
You know, so it's not true.
There is no woman.
I've never consorted with a woman.
It's just not true.
But the important point is you can't control the results of your situation.
You can't always solve everything.
And everyone has experiences of misunderstanding.
Sometimes you're reconcilable.
Sometimes to the point that people actually think you're a bad person, as in this case, when in fact you've done nothing wrong.
Just because you didn't have a chance to clear your name.
It does speak to the importance of trying to explain yourself.
But in the end, you're never going to fix everything.
You can't fix life.
It's just another situation where there's going to be the potential for suffering, where there's going to be an unpleasant experience, an experience that has the potential for the arising of
of anger, of dislike, of aversion.
And so this monk, of course, became terribly adverse, simply based on his, not on his misunderstanding of the situation, but on his misunderstanding of the right, of the reality of the situation, and therefore the right response, or the nature of reality.
He didn't understand that getting anger was a bad thing.
And understand what?
That others might, well there will be results, there will be consequences.
Dukkha hi, what does it say?
Dukkha hi sarambhakata.
There are indeed angry words are unpleasant, are stressful, are suffering.
Dukkha.
And it might lead to blows even.
The next verse is actually sort of a generally good Buddhist.
I don't know what the word is.
A saying or aphorism?
Is that the word?
If you keep yourself silent as a broken gong, you have already reached.
Already reached?
I don't know about that.
You reach.
I don't think it's already.
Oh, patosi has passed.
Patosi.
Asi.
Patoasi.
Maybe.
The arahant keeps himself silent.
Remember the story of this arahant who was accused of stealing a ruby.
I think we had this story already, right?
And it turned out this bird had eaten it.
But he wouldn't turn in the bird because he knew if he did, the bird would be killed.
And he didn't want to be responsible for that bad karma.
So he kept completely silent, even as he was being tortured as the thief, as the suspect for the thief.
Be silent as a broken gong.
It speaks to patience.
Be patient with samsara.
There's another story of this novice who had his eye poked out.
And so all he did is cover his eye, and then when he went to go offer water to his teacher, who had poked his eye out, he offered with one hand.
And the teacher asked, why are you offering with one hand?
Well, my other hand's occupied.
But he was an arahant as well.
So he also wasn't upset and the teacher was mortified and he begged forgiveness and the novice said, it's not your fault Venerable Sir, it's the fault of samsara.
And again, this is the case with this story.
Our situations are, the best answer is they're the fault of samsara.
It's the way things go.
It's maybe not the way things had to go, they could have gone differently.
But the point is that it's how samsara works.
Sometimes misunderstandings arise.
It's not always clear.
It's not always pleasant.
Unpleasantness can arise from many different things, from natural disasters, from human violence, and it can arise from simple misunderstandings.
You might call it a sort of structural violence, where the structure, rather than the people,
is a cause for suffering.
There's no one to blame for it, not directly, but suffering is potentially inbuilt into the structure.
So in terms of our meditation, we try to just be mindful rather than trying to fix things because fixes are not consistent, are not consistently attainable.
You can't always fix your problems.
And so trying to make that a solution is the wrong path.
the wrong way to be.
Instead of trying to find solutions to our problems, we learn to unravel them and to just be with them.
So just to stop seeing them as problems.
to see through the problems to the ultimate reality and to understand the experiences and the objects of experience objectively, without judgment, without partiality, without expectation.
This is what we do throughout the meditation.
We become like a broken gong that just sits there, doesn't ever ring, doesn't ever react, you know.
If you're rung a broken gong, it doesn't reverberate.
Just like that, there's no anger.
There's no reaction.
When people are nice to you, you don't become elated.
When they speak well of you, when they praise you, and when they accuse you, when they vilify you, this is like a gong that doesn't, no matter how you hit it, it doesn't reverberate.
It's broken.
So that is our Dhamma for tonight.
Thank you all for tuning in.
Wishing you all the best.