Okay, good evening.
We're continuing on with our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we look at verse 204, which reads as follows.
Arogya paramalabha santuti paramangdhanam huisasa paramayat nyati nibhanam paramangsukham
which means arogya, freedom from sickness, paramalabha, is the greatest gain.
Santuti, contentment, is the highest wealth.
Visasa paramanyati, visasa means something like trust or confidence, is the greatest relative.
And nibbana is the highest happiness.
So this was taught in regards to King Pasenadi of the Kosala kingdom.
The story goes that he was overweight.
Overweight is perhaps a problematic term because it requires a judgment to say that something is underweight or overweight.
But in a conventional sense, one might say he was and he said he was because he complained about it.
But more than that, he ate too much, regardless of his weight.
He ate too much.
And why can we say it was too much without saying it's a judgment?
It's because he complained about it being too much.
He said, well, he didn't say actually.
He came to the, he ate, they say he would eat a, what is it, a bushel, a bushel of rice.
I don't know how big bushels were or what the actual measurement was, but he ate a lot of rice.
and curries and so on in proportion.
Too much.
He ate too much.
And why it was too much?
Because after he was done eating he would feel very tired.
And so one day he ate and then went to the monastery and he couldn't even sit down because he knew if he sat down he'd fall asleep.
So the Buddha was teaching and he started walking back and forth.
And then what he really wanted to do was lie down and fall asleep, but he knew he couldn't, so he sat down and tried his best to stay awake.
And the Buddha looked at him and said, Great King, are you not well?
And he said, No, it's not that.
I just hate too much.
I hate so much I'm tired now.
I can't stay awake.
And he said, I don't know what to do.
And the Buddha said, Oh, well.
And he gave him a verse to recite.
And it's actually a Dhammapada verse, 324.
It's a ways away.
We'll get to it eventually.
But it basically said, it was talking about the disadvantages of indolence, of laziness, of overeating.
how such a person goes to suffering.
And he had him remember this verse, but Pasenadi was actually quite, well, he was tired at the time, but we think perhaps he was a little bit dull as well.
And he said he couldn't remember it.
Probably it was more because he was tired.
But anyway, the Buddha said to his nephew, he called his nephew, King Pasenadi's nephew, he taught him the verse, and he said, when Pasenadi is eating, just before he finishes eating, you recite him this verse and he'll stop eating.
And you can keep cutting away at his food that way.
And sure enough, it's a short story, sure enough, they went away and
His nephew Sudassana would recite this verse to Pasenadi and Pasenadi came back to the Buddha and he remarked upon this.
He said, it's incredible venerable sir, I'm a new man.
I'm no longer drowsy or tired but I'm also no longer cranky because that verse has sort of taught me
contentment in the mind and so he talked about all the good things that it brought that he was kinder and when when he heard this verse it made him want to give away rather than take for himself and so he gave away lots of lots of charity they say when he heard this verse I guess he would give to Sudassana I don't know it says he gave out thousands of gold coins
And he talked about how he was no longer fighting with his relatives.
His nephew, he was now very much indebted and grateful to his nephew.
He just talked about generally, and most importantly, not eating so much.
He was thinner, and he could go on hunts again, what it says.
It was a little bit eye-opening to hear him tell the Buddha that he could hunt again.
But I don't know exactly what that means, because it was something about chasing horses.
So I don't think it was just about killing.
And the Buddha said, yes, great king, it's true that these are great things that you've gained.
And then he said, having a healthy body, he said, is a great gain.
And being content with less is a great wealth.
And having trustworthy relatives is a great thing, great relatives to have, having this nephew, for example.
And then he said, is the highest happiness.
And then he taught this verse, basically.
So there's a mixture here of conventional and ultimate sort of shallow and deep teachings.
And it's not to belittle shallow teachings.
We should practically, conventionally, we should have what we might refer to as shallow teachings, just meaning that they don't in and of themselves bring about enlightenment.
They're not on the level of insight that's going to lead us to be free from suffering.
They are practically applicable and helpful, supportive of our practice.
And the first one comes from, of course, the story, this idea of overeating.
Because it's something that you find in meditation.
It's a concern of people who want to come and meditate, that they're told they're only going to be eating in the morning, and that's
scary, worrisome.
But then you come and you come and practice and you find that it's actually the easiest rule to keep.
And in fact, overeating becomes a bit of an issue because you find after you've eaten, you're drowsy.
And it's an issue without such strict rules.
It's an issue because I've been in places where they didn't have such strict rules where in the evening they would allow milk or even yogurt or whatever.
And you'll find that by drinking or we would say eating really having solid, something solid, even as solid as milk.
And you find that it takes energy because your body is using energy to process it.
Of course it gives you some kind of energy, but if you're not using it, it just stores the energy as fat or whatever.
And so it is a concern for meditators.
I think less when you're staying here, but still something you have to be mindful of.
Of course, more importantly, I think, is the mindfulness of eating.
You know, being taught this verse every, being reminded of this verse every day.
It was not just about remembering
It was not just about realizing the disadvantages of eating too much.
It was about being mindful and realizing when you've eaten enough.
It's an important part of
It's a practical part of meditation that it teaches you when is enough, really in all things.
But food is a really obvious example.
You find it's very hard to overeat when you're mindful because you're aware, you're present and objectively observing.
And you can feel and know when you've had enough.
So to eat more than that becomes more difficult.
As far as the verse goes though, each of the four parts has an important lesson for us.
And so we'll take them apart.
That's really where the core of the lesson comes from, for our purposes.
The first part, arogya.
Arogya.
Roga meaning sickness, illness, disease.
In Buddhism, there are four types of disease.
And so we have disease in a conventional sense and disease in an ultimate sense.
But the categorization is that there are four.
The first type of sickness comes from the environment.
You could say things like the weather, but airborne bacteria and so on, viruses.
Heat and cold can affect you, I suppose.
Radiation even, the sun.
And the second is from food, the way you ingest food and drink can make you sick.
The third is kamma, which means deeds, but here it is specifically referring to bad things you've done in the past.
Past lives can make you sick.
Even probably this is more referring to past life karma that has made you born with an illness or disability or so on.
And finally sicknesses that come from the mind.
The first two are physical, the first two are things we really don't have so much control over, but practically speaking we can find a lesson in all of these.
It is, practically speaking, important to remember that our environment impacts us and being mindful of what we engage in.
It's important to be mindful about food.
It is important to have a healthy body.
Of course, it's important equally not to obsess over the body.
But you can put some weight on these things and say, yes, I want to be healthy, of course, because a healthy body is useful for you.
But much more important from a Buddhist perspective is the deeper sort of ultimate level of sickness which comes from the mind.
So karma, of course, comes from the mind.
In past lives, we've done bad things.
It's a good lesson to us and a helpful reminder to us of the dangers of doing bad deeds.
That it corrupts your mind, yes, but it also can have disastrous consequences on your body and your future life and future existence.
People who are born ugly with disfigured features are said to have been mean and evil in past lives, who have short lives, who are sick even though they might live a long time or are sick their whole lives.
It's not shameful.
It's not something that you would say, oh, that's a terrible person because of these sicknesses or so on.
It's something as a lesson for us that we can take as a lesson.
It helps us to understand and have a more just understanding of the world that this isn't because God decided that I should be sick or it isn't chance.
It isn't just bad luck on my part, that there's some order to the universe.
And most important, it should scare the heck out of us in regards to doing bad deeds in the future.
I think for our purposes, though, the fourth one is where we find real wisdom and deep insight.
and real application in our practice, the sickness that comes from the mind.
And so practically, on a conventional shallow sort of level, you could talk about the ways that the body suffers from the mind, and this is certainly true.
Even just being angry, just
Generally being angry can have an effect on the body.
Greedy, lustful states have an effect on the body.
Delusion has an effect on the body as well.
Someone who is arrogant or all puffed up can have great effect on the body.
There's even some, and I'm not sure how credible it is, but there's some reference to the idea that the fluids in the body relate to the three defilements.
So blood is related to anger.
I think phlegm is related to delusion.
I can't remember which is related to...
The third one would be Pash, maybe, I don't know.
But there are stories of people who got so angry that they vomited blood.
Devadatta, I think, is one.
And stories of people getting nosebleeds because of anger and so on.
And certainly when you meditate, some people find that their nose is running a lot, or they have a lot of phlegm coming up.
And there can be some relation there.
None of this, I think, is very deep.
It's a bit interesting as Buddhists.
But much more interesting is not talking about our bodies too much, not being too concerned, worried, or obsessed with the health of the body.
Because of course, the health of the mind is much more important.
It has a much more powerful impact on our lives.
on our happiness.
And so the ultimate level of sickness, which is related to gain, because if you say it's great gain to be physically well, that's true.
It's the best physical gain I think to be physically well.
And you could say, even you're rich and powerful, but if you're sick, it doesn't mean anything.
It's a very important teaching.
But it's not so deep as talking about mental health, because you can be physically healthy as well.
But if your mind is corrupt, you'll never be happy either.
You can have everything.
You can be healthy and strong and fit, in good shape, as they say.
and still be very unhappy because of your mind.
And so really that's what we're about here.
And when they talk in modern parley, modern talk, they talk about mental illness.
And I think it's important to point out how Buddhism sees things a little bit differently.
Because making something categorically a mental illness is very dangerous.
Even if doctors don't mean to, when you call something an illness, you say, yes, this person has this illness and this person doesn't.
You both trivialize the problems that this person might have and you reify the problems that this person has.
And by reify I mean you turn it into a thing.
And then what are you going to do with this thing?
I've talked about this before.
It's not something you can deal with.
What do you do with depression?
Once it's a thing, what do you do with it?
In Buddhism, we talk about experiences, habits, and if you work in terms of that, you can change, you can alter these things, but you can't.
If someone has clinical depression, it's not like a possession that you have to carry on your back or in your pocket.
Everyone has greed, anger, and delusion to varying degrees.
For some people it's become so intense that they get in a loop where they have no clue about how to deal with it, how to overcome it.
But it doesn't make it any different categorically or functionally different from anybody else's mental illness.
Now, not to trivialize that, of course.
I mean, for some people it's so radically different from an ordinary person.
But
Even the word ordinary is reifying some kind of category.
It's not categorical.
All of us have mental illness.
And people who have been recognized as clinically having mental illnesses have the same problems and the same resources and the same paths to follow in terms of ameliorating their situation, bettering themselves.
So this is what our meditation, it's a really good way of describing what our meditation is about.
Insight meditation is about learning to see things clearly.
And it's not so much, and I've said this before, it's not so much about what you see.
When we talk about seeing clearly, well, what is it I'm going to see clearly?
Yes, we can talk about that, but that's not so much important.
Important is the state of seeing clearly.
So we talk about understanding and wisdom, and people say, what is it the thing that we're going to learn?
What are we going to understand, expecting some kind of theory?
And that's really not the point.
There's something there, but much more important and much more true to Buddhism is the state of understanding, the perspective.
where you're no longer trying to control and fix and cling your understanding.
It's like if someone comes to you with a problem or someone has done something
And you have choices.
You can condemn them, you can side with them, or you can understand.
You can be understanding.
When we deal with people, we talk about being understanding.
And that's, I think, an important aspect of how we look at wisdom in Buddhism.
That's why mindfulness is so important and so much our practice.
I would say, don't think about wisdom as some thing that you're going to get where suddenly you'll realize some theory or profound idea.
Wisdom, my teacher would say, when you know that the stomach is rising, that's wisdom.
It very much is.
If we were in that state where we knew the stomach was rising, where that was the epitome, that was how we looked at everything, we would be enlightened.
The problem is that we don't.
We have so much delusion and ignorance that we react to things
We judge things and we're ill, we're sick.
So when we free ourselves from that, that's the greatest gain.
That's the first one.
We'll move along.
The second one is another very good way of talking about the path.
So there's the sort of shallow level, santuti paramangdhanam.
On a conventional level, it's very important, I'm very Buddhist, to talk about contentment.
contentment is the greatest wealth.
We talk a lot about consumerism and greed and how you can never always have what you want and seeking out things and even experiences is just going to lead to more discontent.
You'll get what you want and you'll want it more and
You'll set yourself up for disappointment, greater and greater disappointment, when you can't get what you want.
So of all the wealth that we could ever have, contentment is the highest.
And we have to differentiate even here, I think, because the word contentment is used and abused
Many people will call themselves content.
And why are they content?
Because they've got everything they want.
And that's possible for some time, right?
It's possible to be very content when you're rich and have a stable job or social life or family.
It's very, very possible when things are on the up.
But that's not considered contentment in Buddhism.
There's a deeper level of contentment.
Not the deepest level, I think.
But, well, there's a deeper level.
And the deeper level, of course, is to be content with anything.
Santuti, it's a good word.
Tutti means...
It could mean something like joy or excitement or so on.
It really means something like happiness.
Let's say joy.
And sang means, here it implies the idea of what you already have.
Sang means what's there, kind of.
Santuti means happy with one's own possessions.
But it doesn't mean happy with, as I said, certain things.
It means happiness with things as they are.
And the only way to really have that is when you're happy with everything or with anything.
Sandhuti, meaning unconnected to conditions, unconnected to environment.
And that's much more difficult, of course.
It's easier to be content when you have things.
It's not that easy.
Some people are still discontent.
They can have everything.
In fact, most people are.
In fact, I would say it's quite fake to think of contentment as, you know, I have all these things and I'm content.
Why should I do anything?
could argue well you might lose everything but even when you have everything you could possibly want there's always craving for more and the only way is to sort of jump from one thing to another because that's how the brain works it needs new stimuli it needs greater stimuli and so you have to vary your experience
If you try to always be happy with things, like get the things that make you happy, you find it doesn't work.
As you grow older, this is why people are tempering their desires, because they realize, or if they don't realize, they become addicts and go that way, and it gets terrible.
But you have to temper it, otherwise it doesn't work.
The brain won't make you happy.
It's only capable of a certain amount of happiness before it needs more stimuli.
how the brain chemicals work.
But much more difficult but much more sustainable and attainable is the true contentment.
The place where you could really be content is when you're content with anything or nothing.
content when you get what you want or need content when you don't get what you want or even need.
And it's really not all or nothing, I suppose, but it's a direction.
And the direction we take in meditation, we don't, we don't come here and say, Okay, day one, I'm gonna let go of everything.
But as you practice, you let go of more and more, and you become more and more content.
You need less and less to give you happiness.
Your happiness becomes less and less dependent on experience.
You see impermanence.
You see that everything is changing, so you become less expecting that things should be this way or that way.
You see suffering, so you become less clingy, because you see when you cling, you stress yourself out.
You become less controlling.
You see things are not self.
You try to control them less because you see controlling leads to suffering.
And as a result, you become better able to be at peace.
Touched by the vicissitudes of life, your mind is unshaken, the Buddha said.
That's santuti.
Santuti, contentment is a very good way of describing Buddhism, if described correctly.
Understood in this way.
The third one, vissasa paramahanyati.
Now vissasa is a bit difficult to translate, I think.
Trust,
confidence, but confidence in the specific sense of taking someone in confidence, having confidence in someone, or having their confidence.
It's a specific use of the word in English, trust.
In Thai, they actually say something more like familiarity.
But it all points to a connection with someone that is based on trust, based on familiarity.
And the Buddha said this is the greatest relative, someone you can trust, someone you can depend upon.
someone who you have this kind of relationship with.
And the commentary makes it clear that even your mother and father, if they don't have this quality, if you can't trust them, depend upon them, if you don't have this kind of close relationship where you depend on each other, then even your mother and father aren't really relatives.
They're not very good relatives.
And he said, but even if someone is not related to you, the commentary says, even if they're not related to you, if they have these qualities, you can consider them a true relative.
Now, this of all of them, I think, is a fairly what we might call shallow teaching.
It's useful.
It's practical.
It's good to remember.
But the deeper teaching, there is a deeper teaching here, and that's related to this
idea that someone could be your relative without being your relative, which is in itself isn't a deep teaching, but it relates and it points to the difference between convention and reality, right?
Because relatives, of course, are a convention.
If you think about it, we're all probably related by blood.
Generation after generation, there weren't two original human beings, however it happened.
But more importantly, what does it mean to be related at all?
If you had a mother and father who you never met somehow, who died when you were born or even before you were born, your parents died somehow as you were being born, kind of thing.
One of the monks was like this.
His name, I can't remember his name.
It'll come to me, but there was one monk who, his mother died while he was still in her stomach, and they were burning the body
And because he had such good karma, he didn't die.
They burned the body.
And as the guy was using his stick to turn the body, they have to turn it because it doesn't burn unless you keep poking it.
He scraped the eyebrow of this baby.
And he got a name based on that.
There's an old story.
And he heard this baby crying and he pulled it out.
And
I think the king raised him or something.
I think it might have been Kumarakasapa actually.
Kumara because he was a prince.
Kumara means prince or in this case means prince because the king raised him.
No, it wasn't Kumarakasapa.
That's another story.
Someone knows, I'm sure.
Was that Bakula?
No.
One of the monks, one of the famous monks.
It can happen.
If you have no parents, then, or if you were separated from your parents at birth, I guess is a better story, then what would it mean to say you're related to them?
You could argue there's karma involved, but more important and more useful for us is people who we can depend upon.
People who we are close to.
In Buddhism, we talk about, in Buddhist cultures, they'll talk about something called Dhamma Nyati.
Dhamma Nyati means a relative in the Dhamma.
In Thai, they transpose it as Nyati Dhamma.
But the deeper teaching there is that this relates to everything.
That we have many conventions about things we think are good and right.
And about our duties and relationships.
Relationships not just with people, but with places and things like being Canadian, for example.
Even being a monk is just a convention.
Being a man, being a woman.
Many times Mara would come to the bikinis and tell them,
What are you?
What do you think you're doing?
You're just a woman.
And how can you practice?
Because of course, women were not seen very highly at that time, I think.
And I would say, there's no woman here.
There's no woman, there's no man.
What room is there for any of that?
And so this is a good example.
It's not exactly, I think, what the Buddha was teaching, but it does make us think in a deeper sense about sort of pulling ourselves out of the conventional, even human.
Being human and saying ten fingers, ten toes, and two eyes, and so on, what it means to be human.
It's all just convention.
It's just circumstance.
our life, the birth, old age, death, not to mention things like getting a job or going to school, all of these conventions, having a relative, a mother and a father.
I mean, they're not things we should discard out of hand, but they have to be put in their place.
And we have to understand that on a deeper level, there's this new age saying we are stardust.
And there is some truth, of course, to that.
It puts things in perspective to realize that we are stardust.
All of our atoms originally came from stars.
Anyway, I think that's a good, interesting part of that teaching, useful for us to remember.
Much of insight meditation mindfulness is about taking us out of our conventional ideas that are all contrived, so that we can see more clearly what really is.
And the fourth teaching, if you read the verse, it sounds like he's just listing off four things.
But if you read the story, the story does point something out important that these other three may be the case.
It may be true that all of these are, it's true.
It's true that these are all the case, but
None of them are the highest happiness.
Being free from illness, unless you take it on a deeper level.
Having contentment, again, unless you take it on a very deep level.
Even if you do, these states are still mundane.
And that the highest happiness is still nibbana, the ultimate happiness.
And this again gives us direction.
It's not that we have to discard everything and only think of nibbana.
Of course we really shouldn't think much about nibbana at all.
But it does give us a direction.
Because nibbana means cessation, means freedom from suffering, means letting go.
It has all these connotations and characteristics.
that give us direction and remind us of where we're headed, that this isn't just something, oh, if I practice meditation, I'll be free from sickness because my body will feel healthy or so on.
I'll be more content and I'll be able to live a more content life.
It's much more profound than that and much more direct and simple.
It's just about peace.
It's about happiness.
It really is about happiness.
It's about the fact that happiness can't come from clinging to things.
Happiness comes from letting go.
It can't come from things that we get, things that come to us.
It can't come from things.
Happiness comes from the wisdom to see nothing is worth clinging to.
Happiness comes from letting go, the letting go that comes from wisdom.
I've talked about nibbana before, but in this verse there's this particular reminder, not just putting nibbana with everything else, it's saying all these other things may be good, but none of them get to the real point that nibbana is the highest happiness.
These may be the highest other things, and they're good and important.
But ultimately, nothing is better.
Nothing is more direct.
Nothing can be said to be greater happiness than nibbana or letting go, being free from suffering.
So that's the Dhammapada for tonight.
Thank you all for listening.