Okay, hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse 214, which reads as follows.
ratiya jayati soko ratiya jayati bhayang ratiya vipamutasa nathiso ko kuto bhayang
Which means from lust comes sorrow.
From lust comes fear or danger.
For one who is free from lust, there is no sorrow.
Whence fear?
From where could there be fear?
Danger.
This story was supposed to have been taught in response to an event where the Buddha was living near Vaisali.
Vaisali.
And Vaisali was run by a community of nobles.
It seems that their system was set up quite differently from most of the rest of India that was run by kings or lords.
Vaisali was run sort of as a republic.
All the
representatives would meet together.
There was not one leader.
There were representative leaders of sorts called the Lichauis.
And so one day the Buddha was going on alms round with the monks, a group of monks.
And they saw a group of these lichuis coming out of the city.
They would go into the city, conduct their business, meet together in all their finery apparently.
They would look quite grandois, all decked out in adornments and fine clothes.
And they were coming out of the city to go to the
the park would have been kind of a garden public garden or the royal garden I don't know and the Buddha saw them and he said to the monks he says look what I said look monks for those of you who have not seen the angels in heaven look upon these lichavi princes
You want to get an idea of what angels are like.
High praise, really, it seems.
I wonder why the Buddha was pointing that out to the monks.
Or not.
It might seem interesting to know, to have a sense of the possibility.
Being born an angel is quite impressive.
You've been born in heaven, you are quite fine, quite resplendent.
But the Buddha had something else in mind and so they went into the city for alms.
And while they were in the city for alms, the lichowis went to the pleasure garden and there was, I guess it was a public place because there was a courtesan there.
And I guess a courtesan is something like a prostitute.
I'm not quite sure.
I assume so.
I mean, I think it was a little more elevated than a prostitute, but women who would hire themselves out for the pleasure of men, I think.
And they all kind of fell in love with her.
I guess she would dance and
tell stories, and really a performer in a way, I think.
And all the monks fell, sorry, all the lichabis fell in love with her and started vying for her affections.
maybe showing off at first, maybe kind of insulting each other or attacking each other and eventually coming to blows.
And indeed, in the end, causing grave harm to each other to the point where the story says they had to be carried out, bloody and battered from fighting over...
Over their own inner lust really And probably egos as well And so they came out And they were coming out of the park Going back into the city Just as the Buddha was coming out from alms And all the monks got to see What happened to the chivis
And they got back and they started talking about this and they said, look at those lichavis.
They were all decked out like angels.
And because of a single woman, not because of the woman, I don't think, because of their own lust, they are reduced to really hell in a sense, hellish beings.
both being in hell themselves and being the wardens of each other's hell.
And the Buddha said, oh, when soka, when baya, when sorrow and danger arise, they arise because of lust.
And then he taught this verse.
Now, lust is probably not the proper translation.
I'm not convinced by it.
I think actually love would be the best translation for rati.
Rati means enjoying or liking maybe.
But I think it's used generally to just mean love.
But it's referring here and probably generally usually to romantic love, like falling in love.
So again, this is the same verse, the Buddha's just changing one word.
It means that he taught this verse repeatedly in different sort of inflection.
But as a result, we're seeing how desire, greed, lobha and its basic form manifests itself in many different ways.
We saw how it manifested for Wisaka when she was very much attached to her daughter and seen in various stories in this chapter.
But this one deals with desire in a different way.
This is the sexual or the sensual romantic desire.
And again, like all the other sorts of desire, the other forms of what we might call love, it's quite often seen in a positive light.
Romance is touted as a great thing, a great aspect of humanity, a wonderful part of life.
Falling in love, better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.
And by that they mean romantic love.
Love is blind is another thing Shakespeare said.
Sort of.
But many would say that romance is a great part of happiness.
It's a great part of what makes life worth living.
And people would even say it's an important part of what makes life possible at all, right?
Without lust, without romance, they say.
there would be no human race.
Which is, this sort of idea comes up often, this sort of criticism of Buddhism or Buddhist theory comes up often and it misunderstands or it shows how we're not really on the same page when we're talking about these things.
Buddhism is going much deeper and on a much more fundamental level is criticizing not just humanity but samsara, the system within which humanity fits, the system of rebirth.
Humanity is really just the epitome of it.
It's the center of it, because humans can experience great pleasure.
They can also experience great pain, and they're not overwhelmed by either.
So they're in a sense in a great position to observe both of these, potentially.
They're also in a great position to fall under the power of either.
But there's nothing, there's not a very good argument
And to say that somehow keeping humanity going is a defense for romance Really misunderstanding the whole argument And that is that humanity is really part of the problem We're not looking to save or cherish or
preserve anything.
We're looking to understand and to free ourselves from the suffering that exists for all of us.
And in regards to romance, there is a great suffering involved.
So, like all other kinds of desire, it's mostly, most acutely
Problematic in regards to not getting what you want Or having what you want be threatened So the most acute, obvious, glaring sort of suffering Is when you fall in love with someone and it's not returned Which is very common It's only when someone gets lucky Then they find someone else who Wishes to
engage with them on the same level as they wish to engage Also common is falling in love with each other and then falling out of love or one person falling out of love and devastating the other person cheating on each other A much more sinister sort of suffering that comes from romance and that's relating to this story of the lichavis is what it does to you as a person
Lust and desire, like all forms of greed, don't make you a better person You don't become more kind and generous and gentle and compassionate because of your desire You become more possessive, more clingy, more stingy
These are the qualities.
We're not talking about exactly a romantic engagement.
Because of course, people can be married for many years without great amounts of lust arising.
But lust, desire, craving is a key component in the degradation of the human mind.
It causes great corruption.
It's what causes us to fight.
It's what causes us to hurt, lash out at each other.
Why we hurt the ones we love, you see it from a very small age.
People who say children are innocent, I think don't know very many children.
Or don't know children very well because children, as soon as they learn what it means, they start fighting over toys.
fighting, fighting over sensuality, crying and yelling and screaming over not getting what they want, throwing temper tantrums when they can't get what they want.
It brings out the worst in us.
Desire brings out the worst in us, causes us to steal and kill and harm.
talk badly about each other, causes us to lash out and hurt those who we supposedly love, or those who we do love, who we do care for, who we do wish well for.
We hurt them because of our blindness and craving.
We're so caught up.
What it does is it gets us so caught up in wanting the thing that makes us happy that we are blind.
And in our blindness we lash out, not because of any intellectual or rational reasoning, but due to simple blindness from lust and passion.
And so like all forms of greed, you can point this all out.
And I think the last one is most compelling.
But some people might still argue that for them, love has been a great thing.
The saying, better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all, ascribes some sort of greatness to falling in love, greatness to romance.
I think it again relates to this blindness, but it points out how complete this blindness is, that we romanticize romance.
We even romanticize the suffering.
Some people kill themselves when their love is unrequited, but we romanticize that.
We don't look at that and say, wow, I'm never loving, because look at what can happen.
We think, oh, what a terrible thing, but we kind of feel good about it.
Yes, love is so terrible, but we kind of like that about love in a sense, which is so absurd, but it's the romanticizing of it.
And so it goes so far as people, quite common I think, to look at their own situation and say, love has been pretty good to me.
And so they can ignore all the horrors that it inflicts on others, or they can romanticize them, which I think is actually more common.
You just don't deeply appreciate the suffering And even when you do suffer Even a person who suffers from love Probably doesn't say Oh, love is terrible, I should just stop loving Because that would be the solution, right?
If a person had unrequited love All they have to do is see how terrible and horrible love can be Or love is, really And they would give it up
Which is the difference between what we do and what such a person does.
And what ordinary people do when something is causing them suffering.
They try to obliterate it to the extent of even obliterating themselves.
We don't try to obliterate lust.
We try to understand it, to see it.
And so for this person or people who are inclined to say that there's a greatness or a goodness or an inherent quality or benefit to lust, to romance,
These arguments that, oh, bad things could happen to you, like all other kinds of greed, are not relevant.
People can look at others whose relatives have passed away and say, well, bad luck for them.
But mostly there's a greatness to attachment, to affection.
And so again, it's a good reason why meditation is so important.
When we talk about mindfulness, we're talking about a clearer understanding of the experience.
So we all experience these emotions throughout our lives.
We're born with them as we grow up.
We have desires.
Meditation or mindfulness is simply looking at these realities that we are born with, that we live with, looking at them more clearly than we have before.
And the result is that we understand them in a way that we haven't.
Not in a way, but we understand them better than we did before.
There's a sharper, a clearer, a more perfect understanding of the
Emotions And it's that which frees us from From their power From the suffering Which frees us from them Because we come to see not that Not that lust is A dangerous or A cause for suffering really It's that it in a sense is suffering
in the sense of being useless, in the sense of being pointless, meaningless, being superfluous, extraneous, and in Thai they would say yung, makes you busy without any purpose.
Because you start to see how much energy is spent getting caught up in lustful thoughts, desirous thoughts.
And then not to speak of all of the physical and verbal activity that has to go on in order to obtain the objects of your desire, be they people or be they things.
How much mental and physical energy goes into it.
And you observe the feelings of pleasure that arise from getting what you want.
You observe the desire for those feelings, the liking of those feelings.
And observing them, you see how meaningless they are.
You don't see any sense of attraction because attraction is actually extraneous.
It's extrinsic to the experiences.
It's not inbuilt into the pleasure that it should be.
That's something that should be desired.
You see the feelings just as feelings.
Because that is all they are.
And there actually is.
We miss this.
We miss that there actually is no inherent good feeling.
to the experiences they're momentary they arise and cease and that's about all you can say of them and so it's not that you become repulsed by them or turned away from them you just see them as pointless arising and ceasing and so if they are in the end not helpful not pleasant not actually conducive to a greater sense of happiness or peace because they aren't people who seek out happiness the most
are often less are actually not often but are as a result less happy for it a person who stops seeking out happiness specifically because of their peace because of their contentment they are much happier and so if those feelings that we're craving for and lusting after and even hurting other people for
causing stress and suffering in others in order to obtain.
If they are garbage, then why are we doing this?
And so, of course, you have no reason to seek out, no reason to strive for, no reason to even crave for.
So the craving becomes, withers up.
A lot of what you feel in meditation is like the weeds in your garden are just withering up and dying.
all of the weeds, all of the stuff in the mind that it doesn't just suddenly disappear, it feels like it's actually withering up.
It's becoming weaker, it's becoming less vivid, less powerful.
And you feel left with a great sense of purity and peace and contentment, happiness.
And you're free from the sorrows that come from it.
And you're free from the danger.
The danger of being beat up for what you love.
The dangers of beating other people up.
The dangers of getting into strife and conflict.
And if you extrapolate on this, you could point out that war has, I think, most often been fought based on greed.
There's also delusion and, of course, anger in there, but greed has always been the main cause why countries go to war.
Greed by the leaders, greed for power and resources.
Money, wealth, fame, power, opulence.
We do crazy, terrible, awful, the worst things in order to get what we want.
That's the greatest danger.
Not that someone else might hurt you, but that you might become an evil person, a bad person, harmful to others, mean, nasty, because of your greed.
So this is why, this is another reason why we take up mindfulness, why we esteem it so much.
It's another important aspect of why we practice and what our practice is meant for.
It should be a real great encouragement when we see and when we understand
the truth of this, that our craving is not bringing us happiness, it's keeping us from it.
And so great appreciation for all of the people who do practice mindfulness, not just for the peace and happiness you bring to yourselves, but the harmony and peace that you bring to the world.
When you free yourself from desire, you free others from the evil, the evil potential that would become a part of who you are if you were intent on it.
So another important verse, an important teaching on the causes of suffering.
That's the Dhammapada for tonight.
Thank you for listening.