Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse number 70, which reads as follows, māse māse kusagena bālo bunjeya bhojanam na so saṅkhātadhammanam kalam aggati solasingh, which means,
month by month, month after month, if a fool should eat just the tip of a grass, kusa grass worth of food, as an austerity is the point.
They are not worth, such a person is not worth one sixteenth part of someone who has well weighed the Dhamma or someone by whom, those by whom the Dhamma is well measured.
It seems a bit awkward to use the word well-measured, but you have to understand the context.
It's in relation with the minuscule amount of food that you can take on a blade of grass.
So it's the contrast.
Because what the verse means is
the idea of putting significance on the fact that you're eating so very little, like as though that was some great thing.
The Buddha said, well, knowing the measurement in food to that extent and being so precise in the minuscule amount of food you take is nothing compared to being able to well measure the Dhamma.
So this is a story, another one of these well-known Buddhist stories.
This one is about a naked ascetic
who according to the back story was once a monk in a time of a past Buddha and he wasn't a very good monk but he was well he couldn't have been that bad he was just kind of it seems a little bit lazy or a little bit attached to his supporters so he had a
family or a group of families who was supporting him and he got kind of attached to them and so one day this enlightened Arahant monk came to stop at his monastery was on his way here or there and stayed overnight and well he was there I guess in the afternoon he went in they went in to the village and the lay people saw them
And one of the families who supported this resident monk was so taken by the deportment of the enlightened monk that he gave him a robe, gave him cloth for a robe and treated him nicely and gave him a nice seat and treated him sort of quite privileged, out of faith for the obvious attainments that this monk had.
And the other monk was not happy with this.
He got scared thinking, what's going to happen to me if this monk becomes, he got jealous.
If this monk becomes well loved by this family, they're going to think I'm nothing because compared to him, I really am nothing.
And so rather than be happy to have this enlightened monk with him, it's kind of ironic where most of us are just wishing for such a being to come near us.
he got quite crazed with jealousy and in the morning he thought to himself well if
before the morning he actually in the evening when they got back to the monastery he was so crazed with jealousy that he actually scolded the Arahant monk and told him how he wasn't worthy of his robes he wasn't worthy of this the seats or the bedding that they had given him and so on and saying that it would be better if you were to go naked than to wear the cloth given in faith one like you who has no
Goodness inside, better if you were to eat only excrement than to eat the food provided by these faithful people.
You have no goodness in you, that kind of thing.
So he cursed him in all these horrible ways and totally uncalled for, unwarranted.
And then he went into his room and figured, well, that's enough.
Now he'll get the hint and he'll take off.
And sure enough, or whatever he thought, anyway, the monk, the Arahant monk realized that this was a really bad thing for the other monk if he were to stay.
It was going to be a great source of demerit for him to have all this anger and jealousy inside.
So even before the night was over, he left.
He continued on his way without saying goodbye.
In the morning actually, the resident monk thought the arahant was still there.
and so he got really scared that if he figured if we go into into the village for alms then this monk is just going to show me up and he'll never want to leave he'll take my place as the resident monk so after sweeping out the monastery so he was an okay monkey did his duties like sweeping
But then he goes, because it's a routine that when it's time to go for alms, you have to ring the bell.
So he goes and he takes his fingernail and he just touches his fingernail to the bell and he says, well, there I've rung the bell.
And then he went off into the village.
When he gets to the village, the supporting family says, oh, where is that other monk that came yesterday?
We were going to offer food to him as well.
The resident monk shook his head and said, oh, he was, that monk, I don't know, he didn't hear me sweeping and he didn't hear me when I rang the bell.
He must be sleeping in because of, after getting all that, the luxurious bed that you gave him and being treated so well, he's probably still lazing around in bed.
Anyway, I shouldn't drag this out too much because we've got to get into the main story, but
To make a long story short, the layperson gave him some food to bring back to the other monk and on the way back to the monastery he saw that this food was so good and such rich and delicious quality that he figured, because he had no real understanding of enlightenment,
that if this monk were to taste his food he would be stuck and would never want to leave.
So instead of bringing it back to the monastery he actually threw the food out on the side of the road.
As a result of these bad deeds that he did, it actually says that he had done many, many years of meditation, but the commentary specifically mentions or states
that all of that meditation was unable to protect him from these evil deeds.
And based on this one instance of doing evil deeds, when he died he went to hell and roasted for a long, long time.
When he was born again as a human being,
He still had the residue of the bad karma, and this is where the story begins.
He was born in a rich household, but he would only eat his own excrement.
From the day he was born, all he would eat was his own excrement.
He wouldn't eat any food that people prepared for him.
And more than that, he would only eat his own excrement as a result of this twisted mind that he had.
It's an interesting aspect of karma that I'll get into a little bit later, that it actually twists your mind and rather than other people only feeding him excrement, it was all that he would eat.
And so his family found out about this and realized that he wasn't changing his ways.
They thought he grew out of it.
He didn't grow out of it.
And no matter what they did, bringing any sort of choice food to him, his mind was so twisted with the bad karma that he had no taste for anything but excrement.
And so they kicked, and eventually they kicked him out, and he had to go and live on his own, and the naked ascetics took him in, and he lived with them for a while, but eventually they found out that he, they also found out that he was eating extra, and they'd go in for alms, and he'd stay back, and he'd say, oh no, I'll get food by myself.
And every day he did the same thing, and they wondered where he was getting food, so they stopped.
Instead of going, they snuck and took a look where he was getting his food from.
It turns out he's getting his food from the local, or from the monastery, the naked ascetic monastery, from their latrines under the outhouses.
So they kick him out as well.
And he goes and stays by the public latrines.
And when people go and do their business, he hides.
And when they leave, he goes in and eats their excrement.
This is how the story goes.
This is the back story.
When the Buddha finds him,
which of course the Buddha does.
He's become quite a character in the area because what he does, people are of course wondering why he's hanging out near the latrines.
So he takes on this character
And this is where the verse comes in.
He takes to standing on one leg, leaning up against the side of this rock face, and standing on one leg, leaning up against the side of the cliff, and standing with his mouth open, facing the wind.
And so when people would come up, they'd say, who are you?
And he'd say, I'm a wind eater.
He'd say, all I eat is the wind, and that's how I survive.
So he concocted this tale, and then they asked, well, why are you standing on one foot?
And he said, oh, well, I'm such a powerful ascetic that if I were to place both feet on the earth, it couldn't support my weight.
And
so on and so on.
And he basically lies through his teeth and actually becomes a guru of sorts or a holy man of sorts in the area, quite well known.
living in this area near the latrines, this sort of smelly, filthy area, which would be considered a pretty extreme asceticism.
He says, I never lie down, I just stand here all the time.
But then when people left, of course, he would go and find a place to sleep or whatever.
It was all just a big lie.
It's just so he could stay near the latrines and eat people's feces and excrement.
And so one morning, as these stories always go, the Buddha was sending out his mind, trying to think of who in the universe, trying to see who in the universe, whether they be in heaven or whether they be on earth or in whatever realm, who would most benefit from his teaching that day.
And on one day, he saw this jambudika, this naked ascetic, sort of this sham ascetic.
And, right, so the last part, when we get into the verse, is people were so...
so attracted and so encouraged and excited by his asceticism that they came to offer him things.
And so people would offer him food and offer him robes and everything.
And they pressed these upon him and tried again and again to get him to take them.
And so finally, pretending to relent,
he takes a blade of grass and he dips his blade of grass into their food and just takes a taste of it.
And he said, that will suffice for your merit, for your goodness, because the theory, of course, is that they get good merit if it's a good thing for them to give to holy men.
And so thinking that he was a holy man, giving him the food, if he were to reject it outright, he would be stopping them from doing a good deed.
So he said, well, that's enough for you to gain the goodness of giving to such a holy person like me.
And so that's how he became sort of known as this guy who ate from the tip of, all he would eat is enough to cover the tip of a blade of grass.
So that's where the Buddha found him.
And then there's a long story, but I won't go into it, about the meeting with this ascetic.
But basically, in the end, he tries to pull a fast one on the Buddha and says, oh, I'm this ascetic and I have to stand on one leg and I only eat wind.
And the Buddha said, basically called him a liar and said, you know, the truth is you've just been lying to everybody this whole time and now you're trying to lie to me.
The truth is you're not an arahant and you have no clue.
The truth is the reason why you're here eating people's excrement is because of deeds that you've done in the past.
He told him about, he explains to him about the deeds that he's done in the past, all the evil deeds that he did to this other monk.
And then Jambudika
becomes a monk and then eventually an arahant.
So that's the background story.
Getting into what this actually means to us, because here we have a story of, well the main aspect of it is the contrast between asceticism, and the verse itself doesn't even talk about false asceticism,
but it talks about an ascetic act, like if it were the case that someone were only eating from the tip of a blade of grass.
The contrast between that and the asceticism or extreme practice in Buddhism, which is really the extreme practice of
renunciation and understanding.
Really, it's the extreme of knowledge in the sense of coming to understand the true nature or the entire nature of reality.
And so the verse says that you can't compare the two.
But there's a couple of other things we can understand from this verse.
The story ends that how his meditation practice that we said wasn't able to stop him from going to hell actually comes back
and is a support for him to become an arahant so he actually becomes enlightened once he gives up his asceticism and his false asceticism he's actually able to become a monk very quickly they say it's one of those cases where the robes just appeared out of nowhere it appeared very easily maybe they were easily found and he was able to become an arahant quite quickly
So this is the first thing I think worth mentioning about this verse, the story actually, before getting into the verse, is how rightly and clearly it differentiates between the power of karma.
So the power of evil deeds and how they last and how they affect the mind.
So this gives us a hint of people wondering how karma works and what is it and where is it and so on.
This is sort of exemplary of the kind of results that you would expect from really bad karma, that it actually changes your mind.
And why I think it's exemplary is you can see this sort of case in people in the world today, sometimes not so extreme, sometimes just as extreme.
But quite often not so extreme.
But the person, for example, a stingy person will just not want to accept gifts.
People will give them something and they will be uninterested in the gift.
Even if it's something they can use, they'll be like, well, but I'm fine with this substandard that I have.
I'm fine without it, even though they're not, even though it's causing them suffering to be without it.
It actually does twist your mind in this way.
You can see this in people in the world.
The biggest one I can think of is stingy people who aren't comfortable taking gifts from others, whereas the opposite of course is true.
You can see people who are generous have no problem taking gifts from others.
I mean, it's actually kind of logical.
If a person is generous, then they don't feel guilty taking from others because they know that they're just as generous as these people.
They know what it means to give and there's an understanding there.
Whereas a person who is stingy will feel guilty if they were to take too much.
So the way they can rationalize being stingy is by not accepting gifts from others.
There's something mystical about it, but this is a very important aspect of how karma works.
It actually can get so far as to twist your mind in this way that you wind up eating your own excrement.
And the other aspect, the other part of it, which is maybe more interesting for us as meditators, is how far-reaching and long-lasting the effects of your meditation are said to be.
And this is sort of common wisdom shared by meditation teachers in most traditions that the meditation practice we do, especially because it's so
involved with such a deep part of who we are, the very core of our psyche.
It's something that lasts not only through this life, not only in the next life, but it's something that can potentially last for a long, long time until the
like the seed that is in the ground until the rain falls and the seed can grow.
When the conditions are right, the person's past meditation can come up at any time to be a support.
reassurance for us that our meditation is, no matter whether we become enlightened in this life or not, it's not wasted.
The goodness that you gain through your meditation is not in vain.
So I thought it worth mentioning those and kind of pointing that out and affirming that.
But the main point here, equally interesting, is in regards to the difference in practices.
I guess there's two points.
The first one is in regards to fake asceticism.
It's common to find people focusing so much of their energy on external appearances.
So religious people, you should never judge a religious person by their appearance.
At least not in a positive way.
If you see a person obviously doing bad deeds or totally unfocused in their behavior, in their speech, then you can probably be sure that it's indicative of something wrong inside.
But just because a person is sitting quiet and speaking softly or performing all sorts of seemingly amazing asceticisms, it's not a reason to think that the person isn't, as the Buddha said, a fool inside.
So a fool can do these things.
A fool can eat off the tip of a blade of grass.
That kind of severity or that kind of explicitness or intricacy of practice is nothing compared to the intricacy or the subtlety of understanding.
And so the second part here is the difference in value between asceticism and wisdom or understanding or enlightenment.
That asceticism will only ever be a vehicle or a catalyst.
It really depends what you do with it.
Not all asceticism is wrong.
Certainly standing on one foot is probably useless or eating the wind probably won't help you.
Food is necessary to keep the body in an ordinary state so you can observe the ordinary natural state.
If you go without food you won't be able to see certain interesting
It's like you won't have the potential to see those things that cause defilements to arise, for example, the chemicals, the hormones in the body, for example.
If you can't observe them, then you won't be able to, the understanding in regards to those, the feelings that arise,
that understanding can never arise so as a result you can never truly be free from things like lust or anger or fear or so on because you haven't given it the opportunity to arise you've repressed it and you're in a very weak state so you won't be able to it will only come up very weakly
and there's not the challenge necessary to overcome the problem, because the problem never arises.
For example, not eating this is not a good idea, and so on.
But even for asceticism like only eating one meal a day or not never lying down, so only doing walking and sitting meditation or never lying down, this kind of thing.
Even these practices are not in and of themselves of any real use, any intrinsic value.
The only thing that has intrinsic value is
in the end, the wisdom and understanding of how things work.
And Sankhata Dhammanang, it's really an interesting, kind of a rare form.
But the idea here is the ability to tell the difference between good and evil, and good and bad.
So, in Buddhism, it's
the act itself is not that which we consider to be bad, but it's the intention behind it.
So when a person has this understanding of
what leads to happiness and what leads to suffering.
This is considered to be the most valuable.
I guess the obvious thing to point out here is that a person who practices asceticism or is devoted to asceticism is actually devoted to a practice that is potentially a cause for suffering.
And so the question is, what is your goal if you're causing yourself suffering?
Is your goal to suffer?
Because that seems like an irrational goal when the definition of suffering is something that is really, by definition, unwanted.
So how can you say you want to suffer?
There must be a reason why you're doing this.
In fact, the reason
for any rational person, turns out to be a belief that this is somehow going to lead them to happiness.
So this is actually what it means to be able to weigh the Dhammas.
It means to be able to understand and measure that which truly leads to happiness.
So goodness in Buddhism, goodness in evil, have everything to do with how they bring you happiness or suffering.
And actually these kind of asceticisms, for the most part, only lead to suffering.
So they're considered to be the one extreme.
It's the kind of thing that people who have left the home life full of sensual desires, seeing that extreme, are liable to undertake.
It's also something that even, as I mentioned before, in modern times we find people undertaking, people who push themselves
And do something just because it's difficult, thinking that there's some value to the hard work ethic, that something is valuable just because it is hard to do or just because it is work, hard work.
And the Greeks had, of course, this nice legend of Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill.
And we always refer back to that.
Just pushing a boulder up the hill isn't any use because at the end it just falls back down.
There's such thing as a useless endeavor.
On the other hand, something can be quite pleasant just because something is pleasant.
It's not something to be afraid of.
And so this is kind of where true ascetics go wrong.
They think that somehow it's wrong to indulge in pleasure, or not indulge, it's wrong to allow pleasure.
to arise, and that they aren't able to distinguish between the pleasure and the desire for the pleasure, or the pleasure and the enjoyment, the liking of it.
It's possible to experience the pleasure as an ordinary, or experience it as it is without attachment, without any kind of desire or liking of it.
any kind of attachment to it.
So it's just experiencing it just as you would experience pain.
So we tell meditators not to be afraid of pain.
Well, likewise, you shouldn't be afraid of pleasure, but you shouldn't be attracted to either as well.
And so
I think in essence the important point for us as meditators to keep in mind here is it really is about your understanding and your ability to discern that which is of benefit.
You shouldn't do something just because someone tells you that this is going to be of benefit to you.
If I tell you to walk back and forth
or to sit still in your room, that in and of itself isn't where your focus should be.
It isn't where the benefit is going to come from.
The benefit is going to come from your understanding, which I'm telling you is going to come as you're walking and as you're sitting.
And that's where your focus should be.
When you're walking, you should be trying to understand.
Not actively thinking about it, but you should be trying to see things as they are.
and cultivate this clear awareness of this is lifting, this is moving, this is placing, this is rising, this is falling, this is pain.
Just observing.
Once you observe, that's how you come to weigh things.
You don't judge, you don't have prejudice, you don't...
intellectualize or fall back on logic or reason.
Just observe.
It's really enough because with enough observation you can detect patterns, you can detect cause and effect,
And so you can tell the difference for yourself between that which leads to happiness and that which leads to suffering.
Then you become someone who is able to weigh the Dhammas and measure states, which is better than 16 times.
It's more than 16 times better.
16 is just a round number.
It's a hexadecimal back in those days.
So it just means like a fraction.
Asceticism isn't worth a fraction of the goodness.
It's not worth a millionth part of the goodness that comes from understanding.
So that's verse 70 and the story that goes with it.
That's all for today.
Thank you for tuning in and tune in next time for the next verse.