Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with first number 66, which reads as follows.
Which means,
Carantibala dumedha means fools who are of poor wisdom, fare or travel or live amiteneva atana as their own enemy or as someone who is not their own friend.
So people who are evil, who are fools, act otherwise than their own friend, or are not a friend to themselves.
They, in doing evil deeds, or because of their foolishness and their
lack of wisdom.
They perform evil deeds which are of bitter fruit.
So a person who is foolish and of little wisdom acts
It's not as a friend to themselves.
It's their own enemy because they do evil deeds which are bitter fruit.
They experience the results of their bad deeds which are bitter.
So this is the verse.
The story is actually, it's interesting, this particular verse isn't at all related to the actual story.
It's related to a past story, a story of reason why things were the way they were.
The actual story is about Supabuddha the leper.
And he once went to listen to the Buddha teaching and sat at the outside of the assembly.
And while the Buddha was teaching, he actually internalized or understood the Buddha's teaching, and he became a Sotapanna.
He saw Nibbana while he was sitting there.
He realized cessation.
He had an experience of the cessation of suffering just while he was sitting there listening to the Buddha's teaching.
And it was this wonderful thing for him.
And he went home and he thought that he should go and let the Buddha know that he had become Sodapanna.
But first he was approached by Saka, this guy.
I think Saka's taken, he's appeared before, no?
more than once.
Saka is this guy who comes and tests Buddhists.
He's actually a Sotapanna himself.
He's someone who's seen Nibbana, but he's this angel up in heaven.
He's the head of the angels of the 33, the Dabhatingsa angels.
So he comes down and he says, huh, now here's a guy.
who is hard up on his luck.
He's a leper, so he's suffering from this crippling, debilitating disease.
And he thought to himself, well, if there's anyone I could test, I wonder how he would react if I were to test him.
And so he comes to Supabuddha and he says to him,
He comes as a rich man, dressed as a rich man, and he says to him, Subha Buddha, I'll give you limitless wealth if you renounce the Buddha.
If you say, Buddha na Buddha, the Buddha, that guy over there who I think is the Buddha, is not really the Buddha.
I want you to just denounce him, saying he is not the Buddha.
And I want you to say that,
The Dhamma is not the Dhamma.
Dhammo not Dhammo.
The Dhamma is not the Dhamma.
Sankho na sankho.
The Sankha, that group of enlightened beings are not actually enlightened.
You say that and I will give you limitless wealth.
You can't possibly make a living.
You can't possibly live in comfort.
And here I'm offering you the life which you were never able to have.
Offering you great wealth.
All you have to do is say,
And Subha Buddha looks at him as though he's crazy and says, what are you talking about?
I have limitless wealth.
I have the highest wealth.
He said, a person who is accomplished like me,
who has realized the teachings of the Buddha has the greatest wealth.
And he lists off the seven Aryadhanani, the seven noble treasures or noble wealths.
And we have a verse here, Saddhadhanang Siladhanang
ho hiri hiri otapiyam thanam sutat thanam ca jago ca
Panyawi Satamang Dhanang.
Sorry, it's written in Devanagari, so I have a little bit of trouble reading it.
But these are the seven wells.
Sadha is confidence.
So a person who is...
A person who has become a Sotapanna has perfect faith, perfect confidence in the Buddha and the Dhamma and the Sangha.
It can never waver.
So they would never have any reason to think that the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha wasn't what they claimed to be.
Sila means they couldn't lie, so he couldn't possibly tell an untruth.
He couldn't possibly have such a corrupt practice as even just to denounce the Buddha, even just to pretend that the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha were not his refuge, were not his highest...
object of reverence.
Here he means the disgust at the thought of doing an evil deed.
So even just the thought of doing it would disgust or repel.
It would be totally uninteresting.
It would be
contrary, like a magnet.
It's not as though this Sotapanna or an enlightened being gets disgusted or revolted, wanting to throw up, but they are actually repulsed like a magnet from doing evil deeds.
Totally averse and see no reason to do it.
It's just contrary to their nature.
Otapa means fear.
It's not quite fear.
It's not that they're afraid, but there is another type of being averse.
They're averse to the results of bad karma.
So seeing the results of the bad karma, they have no intention of doing bad deeds.
Hiri and Otapa go together.
Hiri is aversion towards the deed.
Otapa is aversion towards bad results.
Knowing that bad deeds have bad results, they don't perform them based on the aversion towards the future results or the repulsion from it.
Sutta means learning.
So all this studying that we're doing of the Dhammapada, this is a great wealth.
But I think we'd have to go by the very basic, because Subha Buddha actually hadn't heard, he hadn't learned much.
The word sutta generally refers to bahusutta, where you've learned a lot.
But here, because Subha Buddha hasn't learned a lot, it means he's attained the knowledge.
Sutta actually means what is heard.
Directly translated, it comes from sada or sota.
Sota means the ear.
It's the same word as sota, sutta.
means that which is heard so it just means having heard what is is truly worth hearing so they have heard that what should be heard and indeed super buddha had heard the essence and the ultimate that which was of ultimate benefit from the bunda so by hearing about the four satipatthana and the four noble truths and hearing about
the three characteristics of impermanent suffering and non-self and actually sitting and practicing he gained this he was able to become enlightened because of what he had heard so that's what it means this great treasure the meaning is
Only one who has heard the Dhamma can become enlightened following a Buddha, of course.
The only other alternative to this treasure would be to become a Buddha oneself, either a privately enlightened Buddha or a fully enlightened Buddha who teaches others.
But besides those two options, which are incredibly difficult to attain,
when the only other option is Sutta.
So yes, every enlightened being besides a Buddha and a private Buddha has this treasure.
It's a very valuable treasure having heard the Dhamma.
Jhāga means generosity or renunciation.
It's often in ordinary or mundane terms described as
generosity, the ability to give things to others, the desire to give, or the impulsion to help others and to be generous and charitable.
But on an ultimate level it means the ability to give up, not clinging to things.
So chagam is that which is given up wrong view and given up attachment, which of course an enlightened being has done.
Because they've come to see that these things are
are of no value, of no purpose.
When compared with nibbana, they are like garbage.
When compared with true peace and true happiness, which only an enlightened being can compare to, they are worthless.
So they're able to give up.
Even a sotapanna is able to give up.
And finally, panna, which means, it's usually translated as wisdom, but here means, it could just be understood to mean having seen clearly.
It's the highest type of wisdom is just the realization of nibbana.
But there is much more wisdom involved there.
The other very important wisdom is the realization of suffering and the cause of suffering, the realization that everything is worthless.
When you realize that nothing is worth clinging to, this is when the mind is released.
So, those are the seven great treasures.
And he scolds Saka and says, get out of here.
Who are you?
Who do you think you are asking me?
This is ridiculous.
There's no way I could possibly have any interest in those things.
So Saka is delighted and he goes to see the Buddha and he tells the Buddha and the Buddha says, oh, even if you'd offered him a hundred or a thousand times more than you had, there's no way you could have, someone like him, like Subha Buddha could never become enticed to say such a thing.
So then the story goes on, it talks about how he gets killed by a female cow, who is actually not a cow, she's an ogre, and she was in a past life, he and some other guys actually raped her and stole her treasure.
It's a terrible story, but not really that much interest to us.
What's interesting is, then the monks ask,
So how did Supabuddha become a leper?
And the Buddha tells the story.
It's actually brief.
I think he just goes, he doesn't even tell the story very detailed.
It just says, oh, in a past life he was a Brahmin or something, and he saw a private Buddha, a fully enlightened Buddha,
and he spit on him.
He was looking at this guy coming for alms, and he thought, what a disgusting, terrible person, this smelly recluse who is coming and begging for alms, and he spit on him in a past life.
And because of that karma, there's the key, because of that karma,
he became a leper, and then the Buddha gives this verse.
And so the verse is actually related to the fact that Supa Buddha became a leper because of his bad deeds.
So we have two aspects to this story, to this verse.
There's the story, which actually deals with a very positive subject, and then there's the very brief thing at the end, which deals with the negative aspect, and that's where the verse comes in.
So we can take two lessons from this
this passage.
The first is that nothing compares to true understanding and true wisdom.
Nothing compares to the treasures inside.
Obviously nothing can compare to our own self-realization.
We are the only thing that can make us happy.
Things in the world around us can never hope to satisfy us.
Any treasures, any
pleasures that we may gain in the world around us, any possessions or attainments that are external, can never compare to the great wealth and attainment that we gain within through our own development and our own
practice, our own realization of the truth.
That's the first lesson we take away from this.
And the second lesson, and I just touched on it briefly, but it's in the actual verse itself.
And it's
It's a reminder for all of us on the downfalls of evil deeds, that if we do get involved with unwholesomeness, even though it may seem sweet, and there's another verse that talks about how sweet
our bad deeds can seem when we do them.
We're cultivating either aversion or attachment.
So a person who spits on others is obviously corrupting their minds.
There are such people in the world who are so arrogant and reactionary and unable to deal with or to cope with
that which is unpleasant or that which is, in this case actually that which is pure because they're so impure.
So he's unable to even stand the sight of an enlightened being because he himself is so, was so impure.
Of course this is
It's really natural and the mind is so preoccupied, for example, with sensual pleasures.
So this person probably would have been a rich, Subha Buddha in the past life probably would have been rich and had great luxury and great satisfaction in his life.
Probably everyone was doing what he asked, he was always getting what he wanted.
And he's challenged by this enlightened being.
who obviously wants nothing and is at peace with himself and it's a direct challenge to his whole way of life.
It's visceral when you see such people who are a challenge.
The idea that there might be something wrong with or there might be something lacking in one's life.
It's a real threat.
Because we build our whole lives up on the belief that sensuality is going to satisfy us and that arrogance is going to serve us well, that our pride and our passion and all of these, our ambition, all of these things, our beliefs and our religions and so on are going to satisfy us.
And when this is threatened, unless it's really true that we've found something, unless that which we hold on to is really and truly satisfying, then it shakes us, it upsets us.
And so as a result, he was evil and mean to this enlightened being.
And the Buddha said, this is the point, that something is called an evil deed when it brings bitter fruit.
The point is that which brings fruit, that which brings pain and suffering.
Again we're talking about past lives, but
That's the thing about Buddhism, is there is no real past life.
It's not an idea of a past life.
Because in this life it obviously holds true.
It's a fact that you do bad things and your mind becomes corrupt.
It's not good for you.
It's not like you kill someone and poof, you're murdered.
And actually it's not like that with past lives as well.
The Buddha remarked on more than one occasion that
Karma is not just one-to-one.
It's not like you kill someone in your past life and you get murdered in this life, but
The bad intentions that you have don't get erased.
They're built up.
They're built up in this life and you can see it.
They change who you are.
They affect your judgment.
And they interact with all the other causes and effects in the world.
And they color your judgment.
Doesn't mean you don't still have the ability to decide and make decisions, but they color it.
They change the likelihood of you making one decision over another.
And that's karma.
It changes you.
We aren't unaffected by the things that we do.
So a person who does evil in this life or in a past life is going to in some way have to
have to meet with some effect, or it's going to change the future outcomes.
Now the idea of why the bitter fruit lasts from one life into the next, and this is often a cause of skepticism or confusion for people at least,
is that actually the moment of death is a very important point, but only conceptually, only because we've built up this artificial, coarse body.
The body is actually an artificial construction that we've created.
It doesn't make sense even if you just think about it.
The idea of why we're here and why we're born into the
human realm.
It's actually something that's been, well, evolution talks about this as well, how the idea of natural selection talks about how it's been selected over time, just not randomly, but by trial and error.
So in Buddhism we take that concept and apply it fully to the mind as well.
The mind has been doing natural selection.
The mind has been going according to trial and error and it's been building up until we finally built up this physical body which now seems to serve us fairly well and so we continue on with it and we
from lifetime after lifetime.
We're repeatedly born as a human or maybe as an animal or sometimes in hell, sometimes in heaven, but mainly always coming back to this form that we've built up and has evolved over time.
But the problem with it is that it's like a wave.
So it builds up, builds up, it builds up, and then it crashes and you're left with nothing and you have to start all over again.
As opposed to some other states like being an angel or
or even being in hell, which transfers immediately.
These are states where the shift is fluid.
With a human, you build something up and then it's totally erased.
So that moment of death,
is incredibly important and at that moment you're left without the body, without the physical world and without everything that you've built up externally to support you.
So again, why internal wealth is such a great thing and external wealth is of course useless and meaningless.
It's because all of that deserts you.
All of that was probably of great help in stopping bad karma from bringing its results.
So you can kill and you can steal and you can do all sorts of bad things as long as you have power and influence externally.
All the good things in the world help you at that time.
But that disappears.
That's cut off when your body dies.
You're cut off from the world.
You can't move, you can't talk, you can't interact with the world.
But what's left is the mind.
And so all of the good and bad qualities in the mind, these come to the front, and this is all that you are left with.
These things that have been influencing, but were sort of on the back burner, or took a backseat role when compared with the body, now they're in the front.
And so if you're a corrupt and evil person, this is where they're able to have fruit.
So this is why it's so much more evident at the moment of death and why we say that people are born sick and born ill and born into bad situations.
I had an interesting conversation a couple of days ago with someone who said, they talked to someone who had complained about how
it seemed like they were being blamed for the bad things that happened to them.
This person had gone through the killing fields in Cambodia, and they were complaining about how Buddhism is really kind of unhelpful for people, or would be much more helpful
And the idea in a theistic religion, it's much more helpful to be forgiven and to have God say, no, you're not responsible for these bad things.
It was a test or so on and so on.
And all you have to do is believe and you'll go to heaven.
You'll be forgiven and you're certainly not responsible.
Which, you know, honestly, as I said at the time, it's much more a question of whether
of what's true.
It's all nice and good if a person is a mass murderer.
It's all nice and good to say, oh, it's okay.
We'll let you off.
Don't worry about it.
If you've done bad deeds, it's...
We're not going to get upset at you.
Of course, that's actually a good thing.
It's a good thing not to get upset at someone who has done bad deeds.
You should actually feel sorry for them.
But it doesn't stop the fact that they've done something terrible.
And so, if a person has done bad things in their past life, it's worth telling them the truth.
It's not better to hide that from them.
But as I thought about it, more importantly is the fact that it really is a system that makes sense.
it's not like we made this system up, whereas it seems that arbitrarily you have all these religions that are claiming something and claiming to be able to take your pain away and have this magic place in the sky that you can go to that erases all your troubles, which is, you know, any good salesman will have a pitch like that.
Buddhism doesn't have that, but Buddhism takes a
offers an explanation that is very much in line with experience and very much in line with even the physical world, this idea of cause and effect, that just like the physical world, which seems very much to go according to cause and effect, the mind as well goes according to cause and effect, and the mind is merely a part of the system.
And so bad deeds lead to bad results.
A person who
a person who's experiencing bad deeds, in fact, to me it seems quite liberating to think that all of the bad things that I've done have a reason, and there's no mystery.
Whereas if I were to say that God is the reason why I was born crippled, or I was born disabled, or is the reason why
In the killing fields, these children, six-month-old babies were smashed against trees and skewered on bayonets and thrown live into fires.
I don't understand how you could find the explanation that God was doing this to be preferable, for example.
It's much more preferable to have an answer and to think, you know, to be able to make some kind of sense out of the situation, where it would make perfectly sense if someone was doing all those horrible things like skewering babies on bayonets, that they should actually come to
to experience or to realize the fruit, the bitter fruit of their deeds, which Buddhism offers.
Whether you believe it or not, Buddhism offers something that it's not sugar-coated and it doesn't make things more pleasant necessarily, but it sure as heck makes a lot of sense internally.
Whether you believe it or not, it is cogent and it's a wonderful system.
It's a wonderful theory, even if it's not true, even if it weren't true.
It's the theory that even in that case, even if you put aside whether you believe it or not, it's a theory that makes, I would say, the most sense and is actually able to explain a heck of a lot about the universe and to provide a cogent explanation of the way things work.
A very good verse, as they all are, and an opportunity to talk about some of these important concepts.
So I hope that's useful.
Thanks for tuning in.
Sorry I've been away.
Let's see if I can keep this up.
Thank you all for tuning in and for your encouragement to keep going.
I wish you all the best.
Find true peace, happiness, and freedom from suffering.
Thank you for tuning in.