Okay, hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we go on to verses 54 and 55, which read as follows.
na puppa gandho patti vata meti na chandanam tagara mallikava satancha gandho patti vata meti sambadisa sapuriso pavayati
Chandanantagarangvapi upalangatavasikhi etesangandajatanam silagandho anuttaro
which means two different verses here.
The first one, na pupagando pati vata meti, the scent of flowers doesn't go against the wind, nor that of chandana or tagara or malika.
These are all different kinds of flowers.
scented herbs.
The scent of a good person does go against the wind.
A good person spreads in all directions, radiates in all directions, or flows in all directions.
And then number 55, of all of these types of flowers, of all these sorts of, of these and all other sorts of scents, the scent of one who is virtuous is supreme.
So obviously we've got a metaphor going on here because we're not talking about moral people being smelly or scented.
Morality doesn't have anything to do with scent in any real sense.
But we have a story behind this.
Ananda came to the Buddha and asked him about this.
So the story goes Ananda was sitting in meditation and my guess, the way I interpret it is that he thought of this as a question, as a sort of a skillful means for the Buddha to be able to teach.
the virtues of a good person or the benefit of being a good person or speak of the greatness, speak in praise of goodness.
So he posed it as a question in this way because otherwise it seems like Ananda was just, why is he asking about flowers?
Because he thinks that he, apparently he's sitting in meditation and he starts thinking, hey, there's all these scents that go with the wind, right?
So the Buddha has talked about three kinds of scents.
There's the scent of flowers, the scent of wood, like sandalwood, and the scent of roots.
I think the third one is roots.
Or no, berries, is it?
Anyway, three kinds of scent, but none of these go against the wind.
So all these kinds of scents are still, no matter how wonderful they might be, they still only go with the wind.
I wonder if there's any type of scent that goes against the wind.
So it's an odd sort of question and it seems like he's setting the Buddha up.
Like you know how in hockey, you know, you've got the assist, sets them up, of course.
So he's giving the Buddha the opportunity to speak in praise of goodness.
So he goes to the Buddha and he asks him, he asks this question, he said, is there any scent that goes against the wind?
And the Buddha gives this verse.
So it's a very simple story.
But I wanted to pick up on one thing that the Buddha said and that's he uses the word sapurisa and I'd like to extrapolate upon that because we're trying to relate this of course back to our meditation and I think it relates best in terms of our sort of our desire to
to understand the benefits of meditation, or the benefits of becoming clear in the mind, of becoming objective.
What are we doing this for?
And so the Buddha's given the highest praise here, that a good person, a person who is mindful, a person who is clear in mind, who is virtuous, sila, a person who is innately moral or just,
such a person spreads and so as I was talking about last night this is the greatness of good deeds is that you can spread them to others they have an expanding quality bad deeds according to Nagasena in the Malinda Panna he says bad deeds you can't share with other people so if I kill someone I can't say through the power of that bad deed may that person suffer you can't share but you can share good deeds with others
because they expand.
This is the power of love, the power of compassion, the power of kindness.
These good deeds actually have an expansive quality to them.
And so this is the idea behind this verse that a good person is somehow
somehow radiates or is detected by others.
So wherever they go, they are welcome.
Wherever they go, they are remembered.
And so this is the idea of the scent going sabadisa in all directions.
For instance the greatness of the Buddha, how we remember it and how we think kindly and how people leap at the thought of meeting a person who they look up to.
I guess a modern example would be of a movie star or someone who we see as somehow in a sort of a shallow way as a role model.
Our favorite author or philosopher or even politician or whoever, the people who are somehow have, we feel have some positive quality to them.
They are inundated by
the desire of others to meet them, to talk with them, to learn from them, this sort of thing.
Now, the opposite is, of course, for evil people, people who are, it goes without saying, people who are cheating and lying and unvirtuous, people who are miserly and so on.
No one wants to be around such people.
So what I wanted to talk about here is actually go into some detail about what it means to be a good person and how this relates to our meditation.
How through the meditation we become the sort of person who other people want to see.
We become a person who
exudes these sort of positive quality, positive vibes if you will, that the Buddha went so far as to suggest that it's like a scent, the scent of a flower that is picked up by good people and people looking for companionship, for friendship and so on.
So the Buddha taught, this word sapurisa that the Buddha uses is actually discussed in detail.
The Buddha said there are seven things that make someone a sapurisa.
These are the sapurisa dhamma.
And so these sort of encapsulate in various ways the benefits of our meditation or the qualities that come from meditation.
The first one is Dhamma Nyutta, that one comes to understand the truth or Dhamma.
We have this word Dhamma which in a
specific sense refers to the Buddhist teaching, but in a broader sense refers to the truth or goodness or righteousness or those things that are of benefit to people.
There's many meanings.
Basically the meaning is understanding the good truth or the truth
And this is really, of course, the essence of the practice.
We're coming to practice not to go on vacation or not to bliss out, but we're coming to try to understand ourselves, to understand what is suffering and what is the cause of suffering.
Really what we mean by Dhamma is the teachings that surround the Four Noble Truths or cause and effect.
When you do good deeds, you get good results.
When you do bad deeds, you get bad results.
an understanding of how our mind works, an understanding of what is causing us suffering, what is causing us stress and what is inhibiting us from finding peace and happiness, what is keeping us from succeeding in life, what is keeping us from achieving our goals.
That which is keeping our life from being the life that we want it to be.
The difference between how we want things to be and the way they are.
An understanding of this is what is meant by the Dhamma.
So the Dhamma Nyutta is understanding suffering and the cause.
The idea is that this makes one a noble being, this makes one someone who people want to look up to.
Everyone wants to know what is the secret to life, what is the secret to happiness, what is the secret to success.
Many different gurus and self-help experts out there claim to have the answer.
Well, we claim to have
an answer as well.
And I think we can
we can sort of make it seem more realistic by giving the understanding that we're not talking about the path to become rich or the path to become famous or the path to become powerful and control the world.
We're actually talking about the path to give up our ambitions and desires and to become content really and to be flexible with reality.
So in Buddhism the
focus in terms of the truth and in terms of goodness, in terms of righteousness, in terms of the right path is quite specifically focused on being flexible and giving up our expectations and our needs for things to be other than what they are.
One way of looking at it might be being natural.
So Dhamma, actually the word Dhamma is somehow related to nature.
This idea of what exists without artifice, without deceit or illusion.
What really is in and of itself.
And this is really the sense that you get from someone who has practiced the meditation and who has cultivated this concept of truth, that they have a sort of a nature to them.
There's no artifice.
They're not trying to pretend to be something that they're not.
They're not trying to convince people or get something from people.
carry out their lives in a very natural way and as a result have this attractive quality to them like a beautiful flower.
There's just something about them that attracts people to them, that people find comforting and soothing.
There's no need for pretense around such people because they've given up their judgments and they don't have expectations, they don't have needs, they aren't clinging, they aren't expecting you to be like this or that.
They understand and accept you the way they are.
This is Dhamma Nyutta.
We think of who we want to be and who we want other people to be.
When you understand and when you've seen and when you've experienced this quality, this virtue, the goodness of just knowing the truth and acting in line with nature, in line with the truth, in line with what is right, with what is...
with objective observation or objective experience.
then you can feel the peace and you can see that this is who we should be.
These are the types of people that we should associate with.
So this is what makes one a good person.
It's really essence of goodness is being in line with the truth and in line with nature without any artifice or construct.
this is lost on a lot of people they don't realize that whenever you construct anything if you construct an ego you construct a being I am this sort of person I like these sorts of things I believe this sort of thing whenever you set yourself apart from others or apart from
the objective, sort of non-specific nature of reality and take yourself out of your individual ego, your individual self, I am this, I am that, and just be, and be centered in the sense of be everyone's, as they say, everything for everyone or be every man, I guess is a term they might use.
This is the ultimate state of being.
You can see that when you take yourself out of this, when you go into this artifice, you're creating something, some sort of friction or some potential
It's a stress that comes from having an artifice up, having some sort of construct up.
So this is the essence of being a good person is Dhamma Nyutta.
The second one is Atta Nyutta, and it's related.
It actually is a part of Dhamma Nyutta.
Atta Nyutta means knowing the meaning of the truth.
So there are two aspects of the same thing really.
The point is that if you just know the truth, for example, you know the Four Noble Truths, then what is suffering?
What is the cause of suffering?
What is the cessation of suffering?
If you know these things or if you've studied them and heard them, attanyuta means knowing the meaning of them or knowing the
or understanding, you might say.
There's different ways of looking at these two terms.
Some people say dhamma-nyutta is knowing the cause, or knowing the cause of suffering, and atta-nyutta means knowing the result, which is suffering.
knowing that craving, knowing what is craving and knowing that craving leads to suffering, but atta-nyutta really means the meaning.
So as the Buddha said in other places, uttrinca sa panyaya attam pajanati, so to know the meaning that is higher than just the words.
So if you've studied, this is the point, intellectual understanding and study isn't enough.
You can listen to Dhamma talks and you can read books about the Buddha's teaching,
And it can actually serve to just pump up your ego if you study a lot and you know a lot without actually putting it into practice.
There's a profound difference between knowing something and understanding it.
which of course you can see through the meditation.
Before you meditate you might have intellectually accepted these concepts like suffering and the causes of suffering or the idea of impermanence and the idea of non-self.
But when you actually put into practice
the teachings, when you try to focus your mind and try to be objective in the mind, then you really come to see how the nature of reality is impermanent, unsatisfying, uncontrollable.
You see these things for yourself.
So Atanyuta means, in this sense,
understanding and comprehending the teaching for yourself.
Just like when they say when you look at a menu and you see the food and you know what's on the menu and so you can go home and tell them what the food at the restaurant is like.
But it's of course something totally different from actually having tasted the food and knowing what any one of the dishes actually tastes like.
So attanyutta.
Number three, attanyutta, without the H, means knowing yourself.
So a good person, remember the Buddha's talking here, is someone who knows themself.
And this is the...
Of course, the essence of Buddhism is non-self, right?
So we have the Buddha talking about knowing yourself, but what he means is knowing the personal or the individual nature of being.
So it's a reminder that, or it's an aspect of the Dhamma that is the focus on oneself.
We often get complaints in Buddhism that we're kind of selfish, right?
We're only focused on helping ourselves.
And it's quite true that Buddhism is very much focused on the individual and on the quote-unquote self.
And I think that is something that is
not well appreciated and therefore even denigrated by people outside of Buddhism or who are new to Buddhism or in other schools of Buddhism that they take it to be important to help others and to work for the benefit and the welfare of the world, the welfare of society.
It seems quite clear that the Buddha didn't emphasize that aspect of goodness or that aspect of practice.
It's not to say that he didn't encourage goodness for helping other people, but it seems very much a secondary thing, something that should spring spontaneously from the goodness inside.
And this is of course the point of the Buddha's teaching, that goodness has to come from within.
that it doesn't matter what you do outside.
Again, it's just an artifice and you can work and work and work to help the world.
But if you're not working from a pure mind, you're not changing the essence of yourself.
You're not changing your universe.
you're pushing yourself on others.
It's the difference between experiential reality and the third person reality, first person versus third person.
Third person reality or this impersonal reality, it exists only conceptually in the minds of the first person.
If you
the third person reality is something that you can create if you think about or if you conceive of it in this way or in that way, you work on that level.
So if we talk about saving the environment, it becomes an issue.
But it's just a concept in your mind, this idea of saving the environment.
Or if you talk about
For example, some important ones like race relations or color relations between people of different ethnicity.
Or you talk about gender equality or so on.
You're dealing with concepts and so you create this issue of gender equality, for example.
when the reality, you know, there's an association, but the reality is still first person, and you're still dealing with individuals, which means that you're still dealing with the likes and dislikes, the partialities of the individual.
When you talk about race, ethnic relations, or you talk about gender relations, you're still dealing with the problem, the core problem is people's
prejudices.
You're still dealing with people, you're still dealing with the first person.
And so if you want to point out, you could very easily point out to people that if you're talking about dealing with external matters, you're still dealing with people's individual minds.
So whether you work on your own self or you somehow think that you can work on other people's selves, you're still dealing with the self.
You're still dealing with just a whole bunch of selves.
Unless you're talking about dealing with natural disasters or earthquake relief or so on, then
I know certainly that there's this idea of helping people out, helping people out of natural disasters.
But the idea of helping society or working for the good of any sort of impersonal goal, in the end you're still dealing about how it affects individuals.
Even if you're dealing with natural disasters, you're still talking about how it affects individual people.
And so what the Buddha pointed out is that what really affects people is their own minds, their own partiality.
So if someone hits me or even kills me, the only way it can really make me suffer is if I am unmindful, if I am partial against that.
So if I'm afraid of death, then murdering me is going to cause me a lot of suffering.
But if I'm not afraid of death, if I'm supposed...
someone who is enlightened, they're not afraid of it, and you can't make them suffer just by killing them.
It doesn't really affect them.
Like, okay, death, well, it's coming anyway.
Or pain, or however.
Really, it does get to that extreme.
But, of course, we can see this in everyday reality quite clearly.
If someone's yelling at you and calls you nasty names, well, if you're not particularly attached to, you know, if someone calls me fat and I'm not particularly attached to my body weight, then it's like, okay, I'm fat or I'm thin or something, maybe I don't mind that.
Or if someone calls you white, you're like, I don't care, I have white skin or black or so on.
You know, if it bothers you, that's where the suffering comes from.
And moreover that's where the evil comes from because then it gets into a cycle and we create conflict and so we have different ethnicities and genders and so on and people getting upset at each other or condescending and holding themselves above each other.
We're dealing with people's minds.
If and when we can break down these barriers inside and break down these delusions inside, these ideas that I'm better than someone or worse than someone, the ideas of comparing ourselves to others, then none of these things would ever be a problem for any of us.
We would never have these sort of
these sort of difficulties.
So the Buddha had this focus on the source, that whether you deal with your own self or help other people deal with themselves, the point is to know yourself.
And of course, it therefore goes without saying that you must know yourself first before you can help other people to know themselves.
It would be silly for someone who had not fully understood themselves to go out and try to encourage other people to do it.
It can be done if you have the right theory, but you need someone and you need the theory and the teaching
of the understanding of self.
So this is a very key concept in Buddhism, the idea that we look to ourselves.
As the Buddha said, Settle yourself in what is good first, and then go and help others.
Anyway, so to know yourself is very key in this regard.
When we talk about suffering and the cause of suffering, it's very personal.
And ethics and morality, it's all based on the individual.
It's based on your own mind and your own intentions, your own clarity of mind.
You can't be blamed for doing something that to the best of your knowledge, or you didn't know was going to happen, and to the best of your efforts you tried to prevent.
It very much depends on this idea, we talk about mens rea,
and the guilty mind.
If your mind is not guilty, your mind is pure, then you can't be held accountable.
So knowing yourself is therefore key, and it's a key part of being a good person.
It's something that makes people, of course, therefore desirable or attractive to others.
It's the kind of person that you want to become friends with, that you want to learn from, you want to study from, someone who knows themselves.
And it's someone, you know, this is a sign that we get even without even thinking about it when, you know, they say self-confidence, someone who is sure of themselves or confident in themselves and able to express themselves and so on.
This is an idea, part of what the Buddha taught us, the sapuri saddhamma.
Number four, matta-nyutta, to know moderation or this idea of the middle way.
We always hear about this and therefore it does play a part in the Buddha's teaching here.
This idea of knowing moderation or knowing the right amount to everything.
So everything from food to speech to
use of resources, the moderation in knowing the right amount to everything.
Someone who doesn't overdo anything.
It doesn't mean knowing moderation in drinking alcohol or moderation in doing bad deeds or entertainment.
It means for things that are beneficial, knowing moderation.
So food is beneficial, but too much food, of course, is a problem.
Speech can be beneficial.
Too much speech or too little speech can be a problem.
Or teaching, for example.
When I teach, if I talk and talk and talk for hours...
As I sometimes do, then it starts to actually become problematic.
The meditators get antsy and start even maybe doubting or thinking or too much mental activity.
meditation even, knowing moderation in meditation, so that means don't push yourself to meditate walking, sitting, walking, sitting without a break, we actually have the meditators take a break in between.
Knowing the right amount of attention, the right amount of effort, the right amount of concentration, the right amount of confidence, so this idea of balancing the faculties,
Too much confidence can be problematic.
Too little confidence is, of course, problematic.
Too much effort, too much concentration, not enough effort, not enough concentration, this sort of thing.
Knowing moderation.
Most importantly, we talk about moderation in food.
You have to know if you... One of the meditators, they were saying, he was falling asleep, and I said, okay, so food is important.
You have to don't eat too much food, don't eat too little food, don't eat the wrong types of food.
someone who knows moderation, but it's this general sense of knowing the right amount of everything, knowing when to say the right thing to say at the right time, knowing when to say things, when to stop talking, when to stop doing something, when to stop working.
In every sense, it's a quality of mindfulness, but it's something that you notice in people.
Someone who doesn't talk too much, someone who doesn't stay silent.
Why are you so quiet?
People who just sit around and don't engage in conversation.
Not that I want my meditators to engage in conversation.
You're excused.
There's no moderation in speaking.
You have to be quiet.
No talking.
But...
moderation in terms of taking a break when you have to take a break.
Knowing moderation in eating is very important for meditators.
It's one of the few things apart from meditation that they have to do.
And so it does become actually a big deal and because it's one of the escapes that meditators have, you often find yourself
indulging in it and so you in the beginning anyway you'll find yourself overeating and then maybe under eating to compensate for it and so you're either weak from hunger or you're late drowsy from overeating moderation in terms of times so not walking too long or sitting too long and this kind of moderation
But a lot of it is regulated by the teacher.
But for people at home or who are trying to do meditation at home, moderation is an important concept.
If you push yourself too hard, then you'll find yourself stopping.
For a couple of days, you push really hard in meditation.
And the next day, there's actually this sort of backlash.
the mind rebels or revolts.
It's had enough and then you get sick of meditation because you push yourself too hard.
So you have to take it easy and think of dealing with the mind as being like dealing with a young child.
You have to coax it and you have to carrot and stick.
Sometimes push it, sometimes pull it along, trying to coerce it into progressing.
So that's matanyuta, knowing moderation.
We have four here.
Five, kalanyuta, to know the right time, to know times.
A lot of these are on two levels and this one it's particularly clear that the worldly level and a level of ultimate reality.
On a worldly level, knowing the right time means not being early, not being late.
You could even extend it to mean knowing the right time for meditation.
And one important concept here is knowing when is the time for meditation.
So people who say, I didn't have time for meditating that day, I would say this is a person who doesn't understand time.
Because you have like 24 hours in a day, it's quite difficult to think that you couldn't find 5 minutes or 10 minutes somewhere in there.
The problem is you don't find it and so you miss opportunities.
You have the opportunity to practice meditation and instead you go and check Facebook or
go and take a snack or take a nap or so on.
So instead of taking a nap, you can do lying meditation.
Instead of checking out Facebook, you can turn off the screen and do five minutes sitting in your computer chair.
Even just five minutes or ten minutes here or there has a really great impact on your day.
Because it reminds you, it wakes you up.
And just one moment where you have a clear glimpse of even a single phenomenon is a real perk for the day.
You can feel this release that comes from seeing things clearly, even just for a moment.
The Buddha said it like this, he said, even just a moment of deep meditation is of immeasurable benefit.
But there's another way that Kala and Yudhisthira has to be understood, and that's on the ultimate level, and that's the difference between the present moment and what's not the present moment, so the past and the future.
One thing we have to remind ourselves again and again, even though we know it intellectually, is that meditation is performed in the present moment.
when you're acknowledging the rising and falling, it has to be as the stomach rises, as the stomach falls.
When you walk, it has to be as the lifting, as the heel lifts, the lifting, the moving, the foot moves, the foot drops.
You have to be aware of lowering as it lowers, touching as it touches, placing, pressing as it presses.
Be aware of the movements as they occur.
And more importantly, or more commonly,
a problem, we have to avoid dealing with the past and the future, letting ourselves get caught up in the past and future.
It can be in regards to worldly things or problems in the past or worries about the future.
They can be, they can overwhelm our meditation and we have to remind ourselves this is not a way to live our lives.
Meditation is, or
cultivating the habit of being in the present moment is a much, much greater thing to do than worrying about a much more useful thing to do.
We know this intellectually.
There's no one who thinks that worrying about the future is going to somehow actually, or I guess there are, but as meditators we've generally overcome this delusion, the idea that worrying about things somehow makes them better, or mourning about the past.
There's no one who could convince you that by dwelling in the past you're going to somehow
benefit from it, people who think that you get closure from thinking about it again and again, I suppose.
But we've more or less overcome this, but still we go back and dwell on it or worry about the future.
So we need to remind ourselves.
Part of the meditation is being able to see the difference between what is real here and now and what is illusion in the past and the future.
The Buddha gave this profound, this vivid simile of grass.
When you cut grass, it dries up in the sun because it's cut off from the root.
And the same when you cut the mind off from the reality of the present moment, you can really feel as it dries up.
This is why the Buddha said the monks still look so radiant, even 60, 70, 80 years old, they still look fresh and new.
Whereas people who have never meditated, as they get older, even 30, 40 years old, they start to look old and sickly and dried up.
And they feel dried up.
You can feel it in your mind.
Whereas someone who meditates feels fresh in the mind.
They feel clear in the mind.
If they're mindful,
from moment to moment, and they can feel the reality of it, the nature.
They feel like a part of the nature, so they're rooted in something.
You can really feel this.
So this idea of being in the present moment, and this goes as well for obsessing about our meditation practice, like, oh, that whole hour I wasn't mindful at all, I'm a bad meditator, I haven't meditated at all today, what a bad meditator I am.
And in response you say, okay, well tomorrow I'm going to meditate all day.
You see, obsessing like this is often detrimental to your practice, because then tomorrow comes and you're like, well, tomorrow, and of course tomorrow never comes.
But this is a common pattern that we find ourselves falling into, obsessing about the past and the future.
Another one is obsessing about the times.
How long have I been sitting here?
And you look at the clock and there's
It's only been 10 minutes, and there's still another 15 minutes to go, and you look at another, oh, still another.
So obsessing about the future will drive you crazy.
You know, people who come here for a limited amount of time, you'll often find yourself counting the days, or when you do the course, you know, how many more days until I have to go, and
if you think like that you won't make even one day you really will ruin your practice and people i've had people do this when they're they're counting down the number of days that are left and just just as soon as you start doing that the first day you already fail so you encourage them you say come on stay on and the next day is they can't even get through a single day when i've only got six days left and then i can then i can leave kind of um
And this is because by the very, you know, you've pushed on the brakes.
So if you say, okay,
grit my teeth and bear it and I'll last through this hour or I'll last through this day or so on.
You won't make it anywhere.
You've suddenly ruined your practice by thinking that way.
The only way to really succeed in the meditation is to be here and now.
And so there should be nothing about the past, nothing about the future, nothing about how many days you're supposed to be here, how long is the course or so on.
it should never be what are you going to do when you finish the course sometimes near the end of the course people start getting excited and thinking about oh when I go back home I'm going to do this and do that and totally ruin their course and oh wait till people know the new me and of course you therefore fail and don't take a new me home at all
This is important.
So Kalanyutta is a very important part of the Buddhist teaching if you understand it correctly.
It's not just about not being late for appointments or not being early or remembering your appointments.
It really has to do with
understanding the difference between real time, which is here and now, and the conceptual time of the past and the future.
So Kalanyutta number six is Parisanyutta, to know from companies or communities or groups of people, Parisa.
This is a
It is a fairly worldly aspect of goodness, but it's something that you notice in other people.
Remember, we're talking about these sort of things that people will notice in you, the changes.
The ability to be flexible.
to be able to act appropriately in society.
It's one of the funny things about being a monk or being a Buddhist that's changed because when I first started, of course I was one of these people who took it so seriously and I didn't want to be around anyone if they were drinking
I remember when I first came back, I just couldn't stand being around people.
Because it was so new, of course, and this was something quite difficult.
And as a result, I made a real scene on several instances, just getting up and leaving in the middle of a gathering of some sort.
Because I just couldn't take it, and talking to people in the wrong way, and brushing them the wrong way.
Which is totally different from now where people can be drinking around me and these people drinking beer and I'm like, oh yeah, how you doing?
Inside I'm thinking, get me out of here, get me out of here.
But knowing how to deal with people and being comfortable around people.
part of being natural or being a good person.
Of course, this is a sign that you, even in a worldly sense, you know these people who are comfortable in any situation.
But this is really an important quality that we have to, that we try to cultivate in the practice.
And it comes from seeing things as they are.
Instead of imagining these people out there.
Like if I sit here and I imagine all of you listening to me and I wonder what they're thinking of me.
Are they enjoying this or are they just bored to tears and waiting for it to be over?
If I think like that, it creates great tension inside and suddenly you can all see it on my face and I'm no longer acting natural.
But once you're able to start to take it as a nature, this is an experience, seeing and hearing and so on.
You know there are people out there, but you take it from one moment at it from moment to moment Being aware of what's really happening and when you see someone it's a seeing when you hear this is hearing and being aware of reality as it is At that moment then it becomes natural And then you of course there's no difference between any situation and you react like a boxing match
Things like boxing matches or any kind of combat where you have to deal with an unknown or an uncertainty.
Of course, your enemy is trying to catch you off guard.
Well, reality is very much like that.
It's not that it's particularly trying to catch you off guard, but it does catch you off guard.
It's an uncertainty.
And so this uncertainty, it seems like this person, wow, how does this person...
Know how to deal with this situation like my teacher.
He was grew up in the rural rural Thailand and
got a grade 3 education and now he's met the Pope and he deals with monks who grew up in the highest of the high monks in Bangkok and so on but he does it all very naturally and he wins all their hearts and he taught meditation in the Vatican he met the Dalai Lama and he travels around the world and teaches in all sorts of different societies because he's there, he's alert he's aware at that moment
It's neat to see him even deal with Westerners in a different way from how he deals with Thai people, just innately.
Not that he knows what Western people are like, but just because he's there with them.
When they ask, he responds.
It's therefore, as you say, everything to everyone.
The idea of being comfortable in different societies doesn't mean studying up and understanding
or practicing in society.
It means just being there and being comfortable and being content.
I mean, the point is you might get laughed at in certain societies because you use the wrong fork or you say the wrong words or you wear the wrong clothes.
Obviously I'm not going to fit in with a tuxedo or a formal dance or something like that.
But you wouldn't, through meditation, you wouldn't be upset if suddenly you found yourself in an awkward situation as I have.
As a monk, you know, walking down the street and people think I'm crazy.
Suddenly I'm surrounded by people asking me questions about this and that.
Getting these catcalls from the punks on the side of the street.
Even walking on alms rounds is a good example of this.
Being able to deal with different people.
I get stopped by the police sometimes.
Stopped by people who are curious.
I get yelled at by people.
It's an example of being comfortable in trying situations because we're not talking about just groups of people who are
who are friendly.
There are also going to be groups of people who are hostile towards you.
In a work environment, for example, your boss, your co-workers, maybe they're vying for the same position or competing for the same resources.
It can be quite stressful if you don't know how to deal with it.
I submit that the most important aspect is not an intellectual understanding of how things work.
It's an innate comfort or being here and now or presence that allows you to be flexible and to react appropriately and to not have expectations.
Because you all know how it goes when someone gets to you and you suddenly freeze up with anger or you want something and you therefore obsess over it and you of course lose sight therefore of all the rest of the aspects of the situation and are not able to accurately respond.
So all in all it's a quality that you can see in people who are
who are virtuous, who are on top of their game, that they're able to deal with all sorts of situations.
And number seven is to know the difference between people.
This is an important one for teachers, for big people, for people who are a role model or a representative of something.
And therefore for all, really all Buddhist practitioners, because there is some sense, not in an egotistical way, but some sense that what we're doing is special, and it's not meant to pump us up, but it's the kind of a responsibility of being somehow an ambassador, someone who has something quite precious to give to others.
So for this type of person, it's incredibly important to understand the difference between people.
You don't just walk up to someone and, hey, you want to meditate?
Come on, learn how to meditate.
This is what people do after they do a course.
They go back and try to convince all their friends and family members that you've just got to do this and this is really what you need.
And these sorts of people quickly run out of friends and alienate their family members, of course.
You have to understand the difference between people.
And understand the difference between people also means understanding the difference in terms of who you associate with.
So a person who is cultivating meditation practice has to be quite careful who they associate with.
This is why for intensive meditators we ask you not to associate, especially with other meditators because they're going through crazy stuff as well.
Meditators are the worst actually for other meditators because you're going through so much turmoil and you're really dealing with all sorts of emotions.
In meditation, you let down your guard, right?
You're secluded, so you don't have to pretend to be anything.
You can, okay, I can be who I am because you want to look at it.
You want these things to come up so you can see them, so you can deal with them adequately.
You don't want to pretend they're not there, run away from them, find ways to avoid them.
You want to allow them to come up.
Well, if you're doing that, and then suddenly you're interacting with other people who are doing that as well,
And not only does it defeat the whole purpose, it creates situations that can be quite explosive.
And you see this in meditation centers.
People can drive each other crazy and so on.
Not really crazy, but really ruin each other's meditation as a result of
the interactions, people dealing.
So we're very careful to segregate meditators.
Everyone has their own room, and we ask meditators to not chat.
I used to say the best thing is if you don't even know each other's names.
Meditators.
The best meditator, I said, would be someone who didn't know the names of any of the other meditators.
It's hard to find such a person.
But we do this because of this idea of knowing, this idea of being influenced by others.
And so therefore, on a more broad level, broad basis or whatever, in your life as a meditator, know this, that it will be very important for you as a developing meditator to choose your friends and associates wisely.
because you will be influenced over the long term by good and bad people.
And even if you're set in the meditation yourself, you'll find that you're drained by such people.
If you try to help people, I remember trying to help monks or help even meditators who were having trouble and putting all my effort into helping them and then realizing that
They're just dragging me down.
You can't really help people not in that way, not in the way we think.
We think by giving these profound talks and by giving encouragement and say, come on, you can do it, that somehow we can practice for them or we can pull them along with us.
And it's amazing how little effect it has over the long term.
You find those people, in the end, they just give up.
Or else they expect you to be there for them in perpetuity or indefinitely.
And you should always be there for them when they need picking up.
And so they never do the work for themselves.
No, really you have to be careful.
And this goes for teaching as well.
Don't go out and try to teach everyone.
Don't just teach people because you think they need to learn.
You have to teach the people who are ready to learn, who want to learn.
And this is something that the Buddha had in greatness.
Of course this applies on a worldly level and it's something that you notice in people, that they deal with people differently.
Something that I've noticed, that I've had to cultivate as a monk,
I deal with all sorts of people.
Some people are Sri Lankan, some Canadian people, and you have to deal with them a little bit differently.
Because the culture is different.
And being able to deal with, and then individuals, I have to deal with children in this way, I have to deal with the adults in this way, and then the seniors as well in a whole different way.
It's the ability to take people as they are.
Again, it comes back to seeing things as they are in that moment.
and being with their experience, not bringing your own prejudices.
The point is to not bring yourself to any of this.
When you deal with people, again, it isn't anything intellectual.
I don't have to intellectually think, oh, this is an old person, I have to deal with them this.
This is a young person, I have to deal with them this way.
you just be there for them and you dance with them and it's like a boxing match and once you see what they're doing the all that stops us from being what people need for us is being is having this need for ourselves having some kind of construct some kind of ego bringing something to it needing something or wanting to express something
When you have no wants yourself, you're very much able to fulfill the needs of others.
You can see right away what they need because you don't bring anything to it yourself.
You just bring skills and tools and help people.
So this ability to, this pukalaparoparanyurta isn't really knowing anything special.
It's just the flexibility to deal with people as they are.
And this is another quality of good people.
So what I'm trying to do here is paint a picture, and I hope I've done that, of sort of a broad-based sort of, I think it would be what we'd call a gentleman, but that's, I know it's gender-specific, but the word sapurisa is also gender-specific.
So it probably does mean gentleman, but I want to be more broad.
But you get the idea of what we think in modern society of a gentleman, this guy wearing a suit or something who's smooth and suave and has all these qualities that are admirable and make you jealous and so on.
It's sort of that kind of thing, I think, that is brought to this Pali term.
So we just have to broaden it and actually think of it in a Buddhist sense.
Not exactly like a person in a suit or something, but a good person, a good fellow, I think is how I like to translate it.
Someone who you think of fondly and who you consider to be a person worth emulating, worth associating with.
Someone who you think about even when they're far away and this therefore is someone who goes against the wind, whose virtue and whose scent goes against the wind.
So that's the explanation, sort of an extended explanation of this verse, a rather short story and two verses, and the latest in our installment of trying to make sense of the Dhammapada and the stories from a meditator's perspective.
So I hope this has been useful both for our in-house meditators and for those of you following along.
on YouTube so thank you for tuning in and I wish for you all to find peace happiness and freedom from suffering all the best