Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse 106, which reads as follows.
māse māse sahasena yoyajeta sataṁ samam ekañca bhāvitattānaṁ muhuttampi pūjaye sāyeva pūjanāseyo yantyevasa sataṁ hūtaṁ
Which means one can give a thousand month after month.
A thousand here is just slang for a thousand pieces of money.
We would think a thousand dollars.
A thousand pieces of money.
A thousand gold coins.
For a hundred years, one can sacrifice every month, month after month, a thousand every month for a hundred years.
One time, not one time, one moment, if one should pay homage for one moment
bhavitat tanam, to one who is self-controlled, or no, not controlled, who is a developed self, who is self-developed or cultivated.
Sayewa pujana seyo.
This puja is greater.
Yanche vasasatang hutang.
Greater than the thousands of
Greater than the hundred years.
The hundred years sacrifice.
The hundred years of sacrifice.
So this verse was spoken in regards to Sariputta's uncle.
We're told that Sariputta had an uncle who was a Brahmin.
Sariputta's whole family were Brahmins.
And before Sariputta passed away, he actually went back to teach his mother, who was still of wrong view, who still had the idea that what the Buddha taught was wrong, and Sariputta had lost his way by becoming a Buddhist monk.
And so we have that story elsewhere.
But here we have a story of an uncle of his, who was a Brahmin, who also had wrong views.
And so it's kind of a funny, it's a very short story, but it's kind of a funny little story.
So Sariputta went to see his uncle and asked him straight up, do you ever do any good deeds?
And his uncle right away said, oh yes, actually.
Every month I give or per month I give what amounts to a thousand gold coins worth of offerings.
I give offerings amounting to a thousand gold coins a month.
And he says, okay, who do you give this to?
I give it to the naked ascetics.
These guys who
as their religious practice take to not wearing clothes,
Because somehow that's meaningful.
It's considered to be more hardcore.
It is pretty hardcore.
If you want to go extreme, not wearing clothes is the way to go.
Because it means in the sun, you're at the mercy of the sun and the mercy of the cold.
You're at the mercy of the flies and the insects.
Couldn't imagine doing that in a place where there were mosquitoes.
And certainly makes you stand out, makes it difficult for you to fit in in society.
But these were the people that he was paying respect to and
So Sariputta says, well, what do you hope to get from that?
So you give money to these naked ascetics.
What do you hope to get from that?
He said, oh, well, because of this, my aspiration is to go to the Brahma realms.
And Sariputta said,
asks, was that the way to go to the Brahma realms?
And he says, oh yes, absolutely.
And he said, okay, where did you hear this?
He says, oh, my teachers, the naked ascetics told me.
Which is kind of how you get what you get in all religions.
The teachers will tell you, if you give to us, it is of greatest benefit.
It's actually an interesting story and in some ways it's a bit
Well, it's not one of my favorite stories.
But I think we have to talk about this and sort of come to an understanding of what's meant here.
I think one way you can look at this, and of course, this is me finessing it.
But, okay, so the story goes...
Sariputta shakes his head and says, Brahmin, that's not the way.
Well, we all know that's not the way to the Brahma realms.
And he says, you're not on the path to the Brahma realms and your teachers don't know the way to the Brahma realms.
You don't know and neither your teachers know the way to the world of God, basically.
And he says, the Buddha is the only one who knows.
So come and see the Buddha.
Come with me and I will ask him to tell you the way to Brahma.
So the problem here is that it's still just an appeal out to authority.
Who says the Buddha is going to know better than these guys?
If they say X and the Buddha says Y, how do you tell which one is right and which one is wrong?
So he goes to the Buddha.
And I think you have to take it... We have to see exactly what's being said here.
And of course the story, the actual words of the story may just be an abbreviation.
But basically the Buddha says to him, giving to those guys is worthless.
Giving to monks in my religion, that's what will lead you to...
worth a thousand times, or it's not worth a thousandth part of simply looking at one of my disciples.
And then he teaches this verse.
And so you kind of get this sense, well, it's just the Buddha saying the same thing as everyone else, if you give to my disciples.
But first of all, you would have to agree, if you follow the Buddha's teaching, if you've
If you have some understanding of the idea of karma, then you'd have to agree.
Well, you'd look at how the Buddhist monks practice and you'd say, well, not just the Buddhist monks, but people who follow the Buddhist teaching.
You look at how they practice and you say, wow, yes, giving to them is a great fruit.
But of course we believe that as Buddhists.
The question is how do we explain it beyond just making it sound like we're promoting ourselves?
Because it really does just sound like self-promotion.
And as I've said before, some of these verses
Not the verses, but more the stories tend to be self-aggrandizing or self-promoting.
So in a sense, you kind of have to, well, maybe not necessarily be skeptical yourself, but you have to accept that people are going to look at these and say, this is just like religion always is.
It's all about gimme, gimme, gimme.
Because some of the verses are about giving and tend to be, or the stories tend to be instructive in regards to giving to the monks, giving to the Buddhist religion being the best way.
But the saving grace, if it needs one, comes from the verse itself, because the verse doesn't actually say that.
The verse makes the important distinction that we would all make as Buddhists, that it doesn't actually matter what religion a person is in, or even what teachings they follow necessarily.
It's that they are bhavidatta, which means they are self-cultivated.
I mean, that of course has to be qualified as well.
What kind of cultivation do you mean?
But it means enlightened.
If a person has truly done something to deserve a gift, then it's of greater fruit.
In Buddhism we recognize four aspects.
There is the purity of the giver, the purity of the recipient, and the purity of the gift.
So if the gift is pure, then it's considered to be of greater benefit, of greater fruit than if the gift is impure.
So for example, if it's giving alcohol or if it's a gift of poison, then that would be a less beneficial gift.
But if it's a gift of food or a gift of shelter or a gift of medicine or a gift of something like clothing,
then that would be of greater benefit, then that would be of the greatest benefit.
Or if it's a gift of Dhamma, a gift of truth, then that would be of most benefit.
And if the person is, if the giver is pure, so if the person giving is a moral person, is an ethical person, is a developed person, then of course their intentions are going to be pure.
And so the gift is purified in that way.
If the recipient is pure, then it's better than if the recipient is an immoral, unwholesome, uncultivated individual.
So that's sort of the detailed teaching here.
Basically it's a teaching about where we should pay homage and respect, who we should respect.
So it's not a deep teaching, it's not the kind of teaching that you would say, well, if I follow this I'm going to become enlightened.
How does it relate to our meditation practice?
There is a sense that our practice of charity is supportive of our meditation practice, even as Buddhist monks.
So giving the Dhamma, teaching the Dhamma is a kind of a gift and it's a support of the practice of the person teaching.
And for those people who have monetary resources, giving in this way is a means of support.
And it is a question that comes up.
What do I do with my money?
I have this money and part of it I want to give to charity.
In order to support my own spiritual development, I want to be kind and generous and supportive of good things.
So what are the good things I should support?
Should I support these guys who are going naked or should I support these guys who are cultivating insight meditation?
And as Buddhists, we would tend to agree that going naked isn't really all that great benefit.
And in fact, I think we're going to get fairly soon talking about people going naked and so on.
Or I think actually we've had the verse, right?
We've had the verse about the man who pretended to be an ascetic.
And it's something about month after month.
But it is important that our livelihood and the rest of our life, our activity in the worldly sphere, does conduce to meditation practice and development.
And so this is a question that comes up.
How do we interact with spiritual people?
What do we do with our resources?
Where are our resources best spent?
And it's not just monetary resources.
our energy, our intellect, our study.
Where are we best to engage ourselves?
Not just in meditation but in the rest of our life because this verse doesn't actually deal with meditation except insofar as it talks about the recipient as being really only a factor
in regards to that person's spiritual development.
It's not just because they are a placeholder, like someone who becomes a priest and you give them because they are in a place, or a person who becomes a monk and you give to them because they are a monk.
This person is a monk and you give to them.
It's not actually considered to be very great fruit just because the person is a Buddhist monk.
There is something there.
You think this is a representative of the Sangha, I'm giving it to the Buddhist religion, but there's none of the sense, unless they are a developed person, someone who has cultivated meditation, someone who has done something worthy, and therefore is a person whose actions and whose
support, the energy and the power, the strength that comes from supporting such a person will go to good things for themselves and for others, will not go to hurt others or hurt themselves, will not be wasted.
So as meditators, as Buddhists, this is the sort of thing we have to think about.
And it's very clear and simple.
Of course, maybe it's a little too abbreviated because actually there's more to it than that.
You can't just give to an enlightened being and hope that it's going to bring good benefit.
You yourself have to be mindful.
You yourself have to be conscious of why you're giving and giving for the right reasons.
You can't be giving to brag to others and so on.
I mean, you can, but it's of less fruit, and you can't just give them anything.
People often like to give money, which is what was talked about in this verse.
Money is actually, when I was in Thailand, there's a big thing because most monks use money, and so it was a sense that, well, people want to give you, why aren't you accepting money?
they want to give and you're preventing them from doing this good deed and I said well you know giving money is actually a fairly poor gift to give because then you're saying to the other person go and do it yourself go and get it yourself
as opposed to bringing the person something beneficial, something that they can actually use.
You can't eat food.
It's very difficult to wear food.
You can't use it as medicine.
It's actually quite useless.
It's just paper.
And moreover, it's a dangerous thing because you give money and you force the person to think about, even if their mind is pure, you force them to think about doing this, doing that.
Where am I going to go?
What am I going to get?
As opposed to bringing them food, thinking it out for them.
It's a very much more powerful gift to give something that they will actually use.
So some people have gone to the convenience of, at holidays, just giving money, right?
Or gift certificates or something.
but it's not the same as actually putting some thought into it and saying, well, this person could use that, or even better, asking them what they need, is there anything, and so on.
But Thai people have this sense that you can't ask a monk what they need, and so on.
Anyway, but it's not just about giving to monks.
I mean, if you give to a person on the side of the road who's hungry, that's a great thing.
You give them a meal to eat or ask them if there's anything they need or you help them go to the doctors or so on or you help them find a job.
All great things and very powerful things that you can do.
And if they come from your own heart, then you actually purify them.
You actually purify the deed.
So it's not necessary to just give to people who are cultivated.
If you give and you yourself are cultivated, then there's the benefit of you helping the world.
That's considered to be a pure deed as well.
And on the other hand, if you give the Dhamma, then the Dhamma purifies it.
Or if you give something very powerful and the gift is very powerful, then the gift itself makes it a pure deed and makes it a powerful gift.
So anyway, not a lot to say.
Another thing that we might say about this is it points to the error of magnitude that people sometimes fall into.
They think of it in terms of thousands.
And that's part of what the Buddha is saying here.
He's saying, really, if just for a moment you think a good thought towards someone who really deserves it, you say, I pay respect to the Buddha or I pay respect to an enlightened being,
then that one moment is actually more powerful than a hundred years of giving a thousand gold pieces a month, which is a huge sum of money.
Because people think that it's how much you give, and it's actually certainly not.
Rich people often brag about how much charity they give, how much money they give,
it's meaningless because it has nothing to do with with your state of mind it says nothing about what your state of mind is like and whether the gift is is rightly given so if you give millions of dollars to fund war or if you give millions of dollars to fund wrong view for example people who put all this money into
Maybe certain religious teachings or religious traditions that are hateful or spiteful or misguided.
It's actually like throwing away money, or maybe even worse than throwing it away.
If you support a cause that is harmful to people, for example.
because it's all about the mind.
One moment of actually just practicing meditation yourself is a much, much greater thing to do.
But if you're going to give, and giving is good, then you should give with a pure mind yourself, you should give what is pure, and you should give to those people who are engaged in pure things.
So, another verse about giving.
That's the Dhammapada for tonight.
Thank you all for tuning in, and keep practicing.