Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse number 113, which reads as follows.
Which means,
It's very similar again to the ones we've been dealing with.
The one should live 100 years never seeing the rise and the fall.
Better it is to live better is the life of one day.
Better is a life of a single day for one who does see the rise and fall.
Udayabayang.
I want to talk more about that.
But first, we'll tell the story behind this saying.
This is the story of a woman called Patajara.
It's the name of quite a famous bhikkhuni.
She's famous for her story.
She's also known as the bhikkhuni who was preeminent among the Buddha's disciples.
in regards to the Vinaya, which means the code of conduct.
She was an expert in the rules, the code of the monks, the way of life, the discipline.
But well before that, she was an undisciplined youth.
And her parents, like seems to be a sort of a trend in the time, afraid of the recklessness of their daughter.
When she was 16 years old, they put her up in a seven story palace, locked her up and made sure no men had had anything to do with her.
except for the servants.
So she was not allowed to have any male friends and she was kept locked up and I guess tutored in the home.
They were very protective, seems to be a little bit perhaps overprotective of their daughters.
And because it wasn't exactly protection, it was more like captivity in a sense.
And as they were to find out, forcing people to behave is not always the best way to go about things, because it turns out that Padachara fell in love with and had sexual relations with one of her servants.
And so for some time this was going on,
and the parents, unbeknownst to the parents until one day the parents came to let her know that they had found a suitable husband for her and that she was to be married but to someone who was equal to her in social status this would have been a well-to-do family in India at the time
And goes without saying that she was quite distraught and her lover was quite distraught.
And so she she made it quite clear to him that something had to be done.
She said, You must get me out of here, or else we'll never be together.
And so indeed, they made plans to escape and she dressed up.
She would have been very light-skinned probably because the light-skinned people were considered to be higher class or something like that.
And so she used clay or powder to darken her skin and she wore rags and she dressed up like a servant.
And when the servants went out to collect water, she went out with them and then made off with her
lover, the man, and went and lived with him in the forest.
And the commentary says something interesting, bears discussion.
It describes her life in the forest, which was full of hardship, where she had to do all the work herself, she had to clean the house herself, she had to do so many things herself.
And it says, because of the evil deed, because of her evil deed.
And I was thinking for a second about what exactly that means, her evil deed, because
Well, coming from the West, we're quite fond of our physical freedom and our emotional freedom.
So our ability to make friendships and romantic involvement with whoever we please.
And the idea of an arranged marriage is just...
is a horror.
It's just an awful thought.
It seems unjust, unrighteous, and it seems that, of course, Bhattacharya was well just in what she had done.
But I think there is an argument to be made for the problem with what she did.
The problem with any
romantic attachment.
So it goes deeper.
From a Buddhist sense, I don't think the problem here was not wanting to be enslaved in a tower.
There's some sense, I think, that that was as well unjust.
It certainly wasn't very wholesome of the parents to be arranging their daughter's life.
But her problem
was that actually she was living quite a comfortable life, a life that many people would, some people anyway, no, many people, people who live in poverty, people who live in hardship, would look upon with jealousy.
And yes, agreed, she was restricted to her activities,
But on the other hand, she lived a life of luxury.
So it's a question of whether the goldfish living in the aquarium is better off than the guppy living in the ocean.
In the ocean, the fish is free, but it's also subject to great hardship and the potential for danger from bigger fish and that kind of thing.
But the point being that with any romantic activity she followed her heart and ended up in a life that was actually full of quite a bit of greater hardship.
And so ideologically she was free and she was with the man she loved.
But if she was able to be free from her attachments, like for a Buddhist monk living in a
in a prison isn't a big deal.
For a Buddhist meditator living in that kind of solitude, not having to work, not having to do anything, it's just ideal for the cultivation of meditation.
So there is an interesting two sides to that one.
But I think also you could look at it as sort of from a societal point of view, that from society she did a bad thing.
From a societal point of view, she acted against society.
Not that I think that that makes it wrong.
There's no sense that simply acting against society is evil.
But there was something wrong with what she did, or it was just a deed that she did.
Based on her decisions, she reaped the fruit.
And so part of the fruit was being with someone who she felt compatible with, which is ostensibly a good thing.
But part of the fruit was that she now had to work very, very hard.
I just thought that was interesting.
So they lived that way, and she became pregnant and was heavy with child.
and living in the forest because they were now outcasts and they had no, no social status at all.
They had no one to help them.
And so she was worried about her, her impending, uh, birth, the impending childbirth.
And so she thought to herself that, um, it's going to be really difficult if I live here, but really my parents have to, certainly they'll, they'll out of love of me, they will take me in and help me.
raise my child.
They will care for my child while he's too well, it can't take care of itself.
And so she asked her husband to bring her back to help her get back to her family home.
And of course her husband wouldn't do it or her lover wouldn't do it because he knew that if he went back he would have no place.
He would be thrown out.
He would maybe even be imprisoned or tortured.
If they were to see me, he says, they would subject me to all manner of tortures.
And so again and again she begged him and again and again he refused to go with her, to take her.
And so one day while he was out working, she told the neighbors that if he comes back, tell him I'm gone.
And set off on her own to go back to her parents.
And she made it part of the way and he found out that she had gone.
ran after her, caught up with her and begged her to come home and she refused.
And so he had no choice but to follow her, to go with her as she went back to be with her parents.
But along the way, because they had waited so long to go, she went into labor along the road.
And so the husband made a place for her to lie down and helped her as best he could and she gave birth to a young boy.
At which point they figured better to go back.
For some reason it was better to go back and I guess the idea was the biggest issue was childbirth.
Having given birth, there was no reason to go home.
That was, I guess, or maybe it was too difficult to go home, I'm not sure.
So he convinced her anyway to return.
And they lived that way for about two years with a son, and then she became pregnant again.
And again she asked her husband to return, help her return to her family.
Sort of the banal aspects of worldly existence, having to raise your children,
But then the issue again of having the trouble of childbirth and wanting to be with her parents, maybe it was more emotional than anything, wanting to be with your family when at such an important moment.
And so again she begged him and again he refused and again she went off on her own while he was out.
And again he caught up with her.
Only this time she had a young boy with her.
And only this time there was a terrible storm
unseasonable storm picked up while they were on the path.
So the husband told her to wait and he would go and find wood to light a fire.
And so he went around.
She huddled down in the rain with her son and with the pains of labor.
And the husband went running around through the forest trying to find wood so that he could somehow build a fire for her.
And he came upon some dead wood that was on top of an ant hill.
And so he grabbed for it.
And as it apparently is the case with ant hills or termite mounds, snakes like to live in them.
I'm not sure why.
Maybe because they're warm.
Or they like to live on them.
And there was a poisonous snake living on this termite mound.
And when he went to grab at the wood, the snake bit him and killed him on the spot.
And he was instantly killed.
Meanwhile, Bhattacharya was kneeling, crouching, huddled in the rain and gave birth with great difficulty and then had to hold on to both of her children, huddled in the rain and it says that
She crouched with her hands and knees pressed together and her whole body looked as though there were no blood left in it.
And her flesh had the appearance of a sear and yellow leaf.
Bad.
She was in bad shape.
And finally, in the morning, the storm let up and weary and cold with two crying, crying children, young boy and even younger boy, younger child, baby went off in search for her husband thinking that probably that somehow for some reason he had just left them.
And so she went searching and she found his dead body.
And this was the first time in her life, for the first time in her life, she knew great sorrow for having lost the man who she loved dearly.
Just instantaneous.
Sort of nothing prepared, nothing you could, nothing that was foreshadowed or foretold.
It's amazing how in an instant your life can change like this.
They say, animita.
This is the things that you can't prepare for.
There's no sign.
There's no signal, no warning.
Death comes without warning.
We don't know when we're going to die.
We don't know where we're going to die.
We don't know how we're going to die.
We don't know where our body is going to go after we die.
We don't know where our mind is going to go after we die.
These five things we can't know.
There's no warning, no sign, nothing to indicate in advance.
And so unprepared for this fact of life, this inevitability of death,
She cried.
She was quite upset and with two crying babies carrying the one, the baby on her arm and holding the hand of the other baby, the other child as they walked.
She figured there was no point in returning home.
It was time now to return to her family, to her parents.
But before she came to Savatthi, which would have been where her parents lived, right?
Yep.
And they actually came to a river, the great river, which was called Achiravati.
It would have been a river in the time of the Buddha in India, 2,500 years ago.
And it was because of the storm, it had become full overflowing with water.
So it was actually quite difficult to cross.
And so they would have to swim across.
There was no way to cross by the fort.
And so she left her older son by the side of the river and said, you wait here.
and she started to cross swimming across with the bait holding the baby in her arms or crossing however she could and when she got to the other side she placed the baby she broke a tree branch with leaves off and placed it on the ground and placed the baby on these leaves and then she began to swim back across the river or walk across maybe she didn't have to swim but she she was
hesitant, reluctant to leave her child.
So again and again she would look back and she kept looking back at him to make sure the baby was alright, this newborn baby.
And she got about halfway across the river and she turned around and she watched as an eagle or a hawk swooped down and picked up her baby and made off with it.
Right in front of her eyes.
Huge bird.
And she screamed and wailed, horrified, just to watch.
Could you imagine a mother having to watch this?
And she waved her hands and she shouted at the bird.
But it was to no avail.
The hawk was gone with the baby way up into the air.
Worse than that, her other son, who was sitting patiently,
on the near side of the bank saw his mother waving her hands and yelling and thought she must be calling to him.
As any good son would do, he immediately picked up and started to walk towards her and jumped in the river
and was quickly carried downstream and Bhattacharya turned and watched as he was carried away by the current At this point her sanity was being severely tested I don't think it's possible to describe at this point the state of her mind but suffice to say she was not in a good place
So half crazed, with the only thing in her mind to return home, she crossed the river, wailing, crying, horrified, thinking about having lost the three most important people in her life in one night.
She returned back to Samadhi.
When she returned to the city, she wanted to get news of her parents.
She sort of, I guess, pulled herself together and asked a man walking down the road, said, do you know of this family?
Asking about her family.
And he said, I know them, but please don't ask about them.
And she said, what do you mean?
That's the family I want to know how they're doing.
Ask me about any other family.
No, this is the family I want to ask you about.
I said, well, I don't want to tell you, but did you see the storm last night?
And she said, yeah, I was out in the storm all night.
But tell me, what does that have to do with this family?
Last night in the terrible storm, their house collapsed.
And the husband and wife and son were all killed in the accident, which was her mother, her father, and her brother.
So the other three most important people in her life also passed away.
And he said, they've died and their neighbors and kinsmen are burning them.
You can see the smoke over yonder.
And it says in the story, instantly she went mad.
I don't know what the Pali is for that.
It's probably something equally concise.
The brevity of these stories is quite remarkable in certain cases.
Her clothing fell from her body.
She walked around, but she didn't notice.
And she wandered around, began to wander through the streets, weeping and wailing and crying out, both my sons are dead.
My husband on the road lies dead.
My mother and father and brother burn on one funeral pyre.
This story stands out as the epitome of loss, sadness.
That's why it's an important and a well-known story.
It's used as an example of loss.
And it's setting loss in a Buddhist context.
Because she wandered around and people called her crazy, crazy old woman, crazy fool, as we often do, you know, thinking we think people are crazy and if we knew their backstory, maybe it would be rather pitiful than repulsive.
And it so happened, as chance would have it, though we might say not chance, we might say rather a result of past association, because it is said in the past that in the time of the Buddha Padumuttara, one of the Buddhas of ancient prehistoric, pre pre prehistoric times, that she saw
the bhikkhuni.
She went to see the Buddha or she happened to be in the presence of the Buddha and she watched
One bhikkhuni come in front of the Buddha and the Buddha bestowed upon her the rank or the preeminence, give her the position or the honor of preeminence in regards to the Vinaya, in regards to the discipline.
you know told everyone made it clear to everyone that she was the best and gave her praise on that regard and I guess she was a Patachara was the woman who became Patachara was a Buddhist at the time and so she was very happy she was very keen on that she made a strong wish
to one day be in such a state.
So she desired to emulate this incredible woman who had become the chief of the Buddha's disciples in regards to the Vinaya.
So this is one of those positions that she was the go-to person for the Vinaya, for the discipline of the rules.
And as a result of that wish,
She was carried into the Buddha's presence.
Not only that, but when she saw the Buddha, she was affected.
And so she walked towards the Buddha and the monks saw this naked woman coming and they tried to push her away and the people tried to keep her away.
The Buddha looked at her and recognized immediately that this was from a past Buddha, from the time of a past Buddha, someone who had made an earnest wish
whose desire was now to be fulfilled, that she had come to the point through all the rounds of samsara, through all the trouble and trials and tribulations that she had gone through to get here, she had now come to the end where she would fulfill her wish.
And he told the monks, he said, leave off, stop, don't push her away, bring her to me.
And they brought her up and they gave her room and she walked up to the Buddha.
And he said to her, wake up, basically.
He said to her, return to your right mind.
And through the power of his voice and the power of her wish and just the power of her prior association and practice, she came to herself.
She came to her senses.
became cogent again.
She became sane, at least temporarily.
And she looked at the Buddha, and she began to cry and said to him,
Venerable sir, be my refuge.
My son is dead.
My husband is dead.
My two sons have died.
And all my family has been killed in the same accident.
I have no one.
I have nothing.
Please, please be my refuge.
And weeping and crying.
The teacher listened, the Buddha listened, and said, Bhattacharya, what you say is true, may be true, this all, be it as it may.
He said that the tears that you're crying now, the tears that you're crying now are nothing.
In all the rounds of samsara, the number of tears that you've shed,
from birth to birth to birth, for the loss of kin, for the loss of love, for the loss of life and limb.
All the tears that you've shed in the rounds of samsara are greater than the waters in all the oceans on earth.
That's how long is samsara.
And then he's uttered these verses, which I'll now relate to you.
But little water do the oceans for contain, compared with all the tears that man hath shed.
By sorrow smitten and by suffering distraught, woman, why heedless dost thou still remain?
and she began to change her perception for the first time in her life she began to look at the world in a different way that instead of seeing loss as something that you should mourn over she began to see the mourning and the sorrow and the sadness as being something that should be overcome and seeing it as a habit and as merely a
part of the problem.
We think the problem is the loss, the problem is the problem.
But the bigger problem or the mourning and the
The seeing it as a problem is a part of the problem, a big part of the problem.
And in fact, if we didn't see it as a problem, if we were to look at the world in a different way and rise above it and see this as just nature doing its thing, if we could see like that, if we could see like that, then we would be free.
And interestingly enough, he also taught to her, it says, two of the Dhammapada verses that we're going to learn later on.
So I'm not going to relate those to you because they come much, much later on.
He related verses 288 and 289.
So he reused these verses.
These verses were... The Dhammapada verses are the pithy sayings of the Buddha.
They're the sort of...
iconic or exemplary or the sort of
it's iconic maybe is the word the teachings that stand out and the Buddha would use these verses would teach using these verses at different times and so teaching these verses Bhadachara became a Sotapanna while he was giving this teaching her mind was fixed and focused and she was able to see the truth and through the power of the Buddha's voice and through his presence she was able to calm herself and was able to see things clearly
And at the moment, after becoming a sotapanna, she became aware of the fact that she was naked and she, for the first time in quite some time, she became modest and she huddled down and tried to cover herself up.
And someone in the audience handed her a cloth and she wrapped the cloth around herself.
and at that point she requested that she to be admitted into the community of monks and she was admitted and she became a bhikkhuni and indeed became
the Buddha's eminent disciple in regards to the discipline.
Now the story of the verse itself comes from a story that occurred during Bhattacharya's life as a bhikkhuni.
The story goes that she was, because she was intensely in meditation, as a sotapanna, she was engaging in the practice to become an arahant.
And so one day, being very mindful, she was pouring water out to wash her feet.
And she watched as the water went out into the soil on the ground and it would go out for some ways and then sink into the ground.
And then watched as the water went out further and then again it sunk into the ground.
And she saw how it would go out and then it would just disappear.
And she was watching this
And it's interesting how it hit her as
really just the nature of beings because she was so fixed in the meditation she saw this as the life of human beings so some water would go out a little ways and then fall into the ground some water would go out further she thought this is like human beings some human beings are born and die quite quickly quite soon because she would have been consumed still with the thoughts of her children some go out a little further like her husband
And some go out very far, but in the end, all the water, just as all the water disappears into the ground, so too everyone dies.
And it was just this idea of change.
Equating the two had to do with her perception of everything ceasing.
Things arise and then they cease.
The water comes out of the pot and into the ground.
Humans come out of the womb and into the ground and end up in the ground as well.
And the Buddha was, the story goes, I mean this is apparently a common thing, the Buddha was able to psychically become aware of Bhattacharya's thoughts and present himself to her psychically.
But if you don't like that version of the story, you can change it and say he came to talk to her.
But the point is that he taught her the verse that would end up leading her to become an arahant, and that's our verse.
And it emphasizes a very important aspect of the Buddhist teaching, and that's the arising and ceasing.
So the Udayabhayam, the rise and fall.
And so I didn't explain it, but to explain it now, it refers to the fact that everything in the world arises and ceases.
In fact, reality
which is based on experience, arises and ceases every moment.
And so more than just what she was seeing with the water, it actually goes quite deeper than that.
And through the practice of meditation, she would be seeing that actually everything arises and ceases momentarily.
And by watching that, by looking at that, even just for a moment,
Seeing that, if you see it clearly, even that can lead to enlightenment.
It shows you impermanence.
It shows you what we call suffering.
But by suffering, it's just a word that means it's not happiness or it's not satisfying.
Because it's nothing.
If it arises and ceases, you can't hold on to it.
You can't depend upon it.
It can't bring you true satisfaction.
Of course it can't.
It arises and ceases.
and non self, which means it's not an entity.
It's not a thing that an atom because we know from from school that energy, physical energy and matter can never be created or destroyed.
But experience is created and destroyed constantly.
And experience arises, wasn't there a moment ago, and it ceases.
And isn't there ever again.
So seeing this for a moment is better than to live a hundred years and never see this.
And this story really drives that home because life is full of great suffering.
And so to say that life is great and long life is great and it's good to live long and so on.
There are people in the world who hope to die when they're 60.
Oh, 60 is enough.
Remember, I think when we were young, some people, some kids would say that.
When I'm 60, I'm just going to kill myself because anything older than that.
Silliness.
But we do, for the most part, we're keen to live.
And there's a problem with that line of thinking, with the idea of long life.
Because it's not the quantity, of course, it's the quality.
And mostly we live our lives unprepared for the sort of things that Patachara had to go through.
Unprepared, but fully susceptible, vulnerable to these things.
Nowadays there's great suffering in the world.
There's great tragedy and it can strike.
It's not just something that happens to other people in other places of the world.
This happens all over the world.
It could happen to us anytime.
Something we should consider.
Something that a Buddhist would consider.
The fact that I could walk outside and run over by a car or be shot with a gun or be gored by a wild bull, a wild cow.
Anything could happen.
And we're, for the most part, not prepared for it.
Why?
Because we don't see it.
We don't see reality as it is.
We think of things as stable and lasting.
We think of things as satisfying.
We think of things as controllable, stable, under our control.
We try so hard, live our lives constantly, working to bring things under our control, to make things stable, to make things satisfying, to attain and to
Hold on to things that we think will satisfy us and never are we satisfied.
Never are we content, never are we at peace and we're never quite sure why that is.
We always think just if I get this, just this next thing then I'll be satisfied.
And so seeing the rise and fall is very important.
It's actually, on a basic level, it's the entrance to vipassana insight.
So when you first start to see things as arising and ceasing, that's the moment when you begin to practice vipassana meditation.
And that's the first of the insight knowledges.
Udaya bhajnana, knowledge of arise and fall.
So seeing that everything, it's not intellectual, it's actually seeing.
When the meditator practices enough, they'll begin to see that everything, they'll see things arise and cease.
And so they'll see that everything arises and ceases.
Of course, as they practice on, and once they get a sense that this is the case with everything, they really get a sense that it's universal, they'll come to a point where it just hits them.
And that's the moment of the realization of Nibbana.
So that's the real knowledge of Udayabhaya.
Whereas, as we know from Kondanya, the first of the Arahants, the first of the Sotapanna followers of the Buddha, the first person to see Nibbana after the Buddha,
And what they say about him is that he saw that everything that has the nature to arise also has the nature to cease.
So that's the teaching.
It relates directly to our practice.
It's a very important one.
It's a very important aspect of meditation that we should see this.
Of course, it shouldn't be intellectual.
It's not something I should describe to you and you try to appreciate intellectually.
It's something that you will see, and when you see it, it's good to have it described to you, have it pointed out to you that that's what you're seeing.
You'll see things arising and ceasing.
You'll see that whereas before you thought there was me and mine and I and there were entities, now you see that actually it's just phenomena arising and ceasing experientially.
It's an important aspect of our practice.
So, a good teaching, very much worth explaining, and a moving story, I think.
It's a story that we talk about quite often, one that we come back to again and again as an example of
someone who changed the way they looked at the world, someone who was consumed by grief and hardship that most of us, well many of us, never have to deal with, have never had to deal with.
And she was able to look at it in a new way.
She was given this wise advice of the Buddha, a very famous quote, that all the water and all the oceans is nothing compared to the tears that we have shed.
So why are we still crying?
And indeed she stopped crying.
As should we all.
So that's the Dhamma for tonight.
Thank you all for tuning in.
Wishing you all the best.
Keep practicing and be well.