Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Tonight we're looking at verse 176, which reads as follows.
ekam dhammang atitas musavadisa chantuno vitina paralokas natipapang akaryam
which means for one who transgresses one Dhamma, one thing the person who speaks falsely this one thing one who has discarded
the afterlife, thrown away their afterlife.
There is no evil they won't do.
There is no evil that will not be done by such a person.
Some weighty words.
So the Buddha told this verse in response to, and I keep saying this, but this is one of the more famous stories in Buddhist, I guess they're all pretty well known, but this one especially I think is one of the more well known in Asian culture, in Asian Buddhist culture.
Probably not so much in the West.
We don't know a lot of the stories, which is a shame.
Well, we're trying to remedy that partly in this series.
The story goes, as it's been passed down, that the Buddha was spreading his teachings throughout the area in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, that area of the world.
And his virtues were being spread and he was becoming quite famous.
And he was honored by kings and rich people alike.
And so his teaching was flourishing because of just how great it was.
I don't think there should be any doubt that that was the case considering how great his teaching is.
I mean, for most of the people who have been watching these videos since the beginning, it's quite clear that there's some greatness to the Buddha's teaching.
For people who have practiced the meditation in this tradition, they can easily agree that
It's no wonder that Buddhism is such a powerful force in the world, even in the midst of a lot of other powerful forces.
And speaking of powerful forces, even in India, they weren't all Buddhists.
In fact, of course, when the Buddha arose, there were already religious traditions and religious teachers present.
And they weren't very happy about the Buddha's fame.
They became quite disturbed by it.
So the text says they would gather in the street
chastise people for being so taken by the Buddha, saying, is the monk Gautama the only Buddha?
We also are Buddhas.
Does that alone which is given to him yield abundant fruit?
That which is given to us returns abundant fruit.
So this was important for people.
They supported religious people, and there was a tradition of supporting the religion that
you believed would
bear fruit.
You know, for a lot of people, they're not thinking about becoming enlightened.
They just want a better life.
And there was a belief, and still is a belief, that I think is, in some ways, well-founded.
In some ways, it's embellished, I think, by religious people, that if you give to a religious person, there's some good karma that comes from it, right?
You get benefits back.
And we certainly...
And the Buddha certainly affirmed that sort of a thing.
And I'll talk a little bit more.
I think it's actually an interesting lesson.
But I think we have to be careful not to embellish this idea.
Anyway, this was people's thinking.
And these monks were like, well, give to us.
Support us.
Give us all these monasteries and food and robes.
We're Buddhas as well.
But it didn't work, of course, because their teachings, I mean this is the thing, not all teachings, it should go without saying, and it shouldn't need to be said, that not all teachings are alike.
Anyone who says that all religions are alike or teach the same thing, it's, I've said this before, it's a nice thought, and it certainly is useful, practical, when you're living amongst, when you're living in a multicultural, multi-religious society.
Otherwise you just fight.
But it's not really true.
It's true that there are teachings out there that are kind of bizarre, and there are meditation teachings that certainly don't lead to great things.
There are others that lead to great things, but not to the greatest thing.
So it's not even fair to say that all meditation teachings are the same, all spiritual paths lead to the same goal.
It's not really true.
There are many goals and there are practices that don't even lead to the goals that they say.
So we will claim that the Buddha's teaching is that which leads to the highest goal.
All these other teachings, they might do good, they might be good, but they don't lead to the ultimate goal.
Anyway, at the time, there was a woman who was ordained in one of these traditions, which is neat.
I mean, even outside of Buddhism at the time, it wasn't that women weren't allowed or weren't found practicing spiritual life.
Even outside of the Buddhist teaching, it seems there were women, rare, I guess,
but there were women who undertook to practice spirituality.
I mean, that shouldn't be a surprise.
It's kind of, we make Indian society out to be, ancient Indian society out to be very anti-woman or, you know, what's the patriarchal or whatever, sexist.
And I think there's definitely something to that.
I don't think even the Buddha was free from that sort of
thinking simply because of the nature of the culture.
But anyway, it's not to say.
Women certainly were not in any way less interested in enlightenment.
We can say that for sure.
So this woman, unfortunately, found her way into the wrong group.
We can say with some certainty it was the wrong group, even if you think some of these other groups had their heads on straight.
This group certainly didn't.
They were very jealous.
And so one day they thought, ah, well, she'll help us.
Well, we'll get her to
find a way to cast reproach upon the monk Gautama.
Yes, that is the way.
And so when she came to the monastery, they made this whole ordeal out of it.
They just sat there and wouldn't talk to her.
She paid respect to them, and they kind of just turned away and wouldn't talk to her.
And she said, what have I done?
Have I done anything wrong?
They wouldn't talk to her.
They said, what, don't you know?
That was an act, really.
Don't you know this Gautama, he's ruining us.
Everyone's falling for his honeyed words, his sweet tongue.
Something about him, he's charming them, and so on.
And she said, I don't know who that is, but can I help you in some way?
And he said, well, if you wish us well,
Find a way to cast reproach upon the monk Gautama and put an end to the gain and honor bestowed upon him.
Find some way to besmirch his good name.
OK, I will do that.
I will take the responsibility.
She seems to have not been a very good person either, so it's reasonable to understand.
It's easy to understand how she got caught up with these losers.
She appears to have been a bit of one herself.
And so she undertook to
some kind of subterfuge.
What she did was, in the beginning she would just go and spend the night near the monastery, or she would walk to the monastery when everyone was coming back.
So every evening the Buddha would give a talk, and in the evening when they were all coming back, kind of late night perhaps, she would walk towards the monastery.
And people would ask, where are you going?
And in the beginning she said, I don't, I'm not, it's private, something like that.
And just something actually to make them suspicious.
Don't tell them where you're going, and they get even more suspicious.
And then she would go and sleep somewhere near the monastery where the Buddha was staying.
And in the morning, when the people would come to give food and listen to the Buddha's teaching in the morning, she would walk away from the monastery and say, where are you coming from?
And again, she would say, it's my own business.
And she did this for like a month.
And after a month, she started telling people.
When they asked her, she would say, I'm staying with Gautama, staying with him in his kutti.
And unfortunately, as we all know, not everyone is discerning enough to see the truth of such statements.
It's not impossible.
It's not even probably all that hard to fool the majority or a good majority of people.
You can see this in politics.
It's not really to cast aspersions on such people, but
Sometimes you're trying to live your life, you don't have the time to investigate, and you find yourself listening.
And especially for people who didn't have a strong knowledge of the Buddhist teaching, or a strong sense of the goodness and the rightness of it, for them it was quite easy to convince them, or at least make them suspicious.
Didn't convince them, but they became very suspicious.
And they said to themselves, is it true or is it false?
They had doubt.
And doubt is of course a problematic mind state.
And then,
After three or four months of that, so it was a real long con, she wrapped her belly up with bandages and went about, you know, so to make her stomach a little bit larger.
And she went around saying, oh, I'm pregnant.
I'm carrying Gautama's child.
And again, people became more suspicious and some people lost interest in the Buddha.
You know how that goes, right?
Reputation is so easy to lose.
It's not entirely true, but it's easy to hurt someone's reputation.
It's such a fickle thing.
And then after eight or nine months, she put some wood, a big, actually a big half sphere, I guess, or something in her belly to, you know, I guess to put some weight and drew a cloak over it.
And then she beat herself, like pounded her arms and legs to make her, make them swell.
So she appeared swollen.
and then pretending to be tired, she went, went one evening, and this is the climax of the story, went to where the Buddha was teaching.
So in front of all the people, the Buddha was there with a hall full of people teaching and stood before him.
And she gave quite a speech.
She said, Oh,
Look at this great group of people you've come to teach.
You have a sweet voice, soft lips.
She actually says that, I guess, you have soft lips.
But you're the father of my child and I'm getting ready to deliver.
My time of delivery is soon.
In spite of this, you haven't supported me.
You make no effort to give me the requirements for yada, yada, yada, so on.
And she says, you know well enough how to take your pleasure, but you know not how to look after the child you have begotten.
Thus did she revile the Buddha.
Can you imagine, no?
Remember, the theme here is lies.
Well, as lies go, this is a pretty, I mean, yeah, it's a pretty severe one.
I mean, towards the Buddha, for such a great and powerful being.
From Buddha's point of view, there's not much worse you can do.
And the Buddha stopped teaching.
And he looked at her.
And what do you think he did?
Do you think he denied it?
It's interesting.
Sometimes when you deny it, it makes it worse.
But what he said to her, and they say it's like a lion's roar.
A lion's roar is just like a speech that is very powerful.
And the most powerful speech here, I mean, I think it is quite powerful.
is to call upon the truth.
And he said to her, he says to her, in regards to this matter, you know the truth, and I know the truth.
That was his response.
And she didn't let up.
She says, so who is to decide between what is true and what is false, when only you and I know?
And then suddenly, I'm skipping a bit here, but we'll say suddenly, through some means or other, fortuitous circumstance, the piece of wood slipped and fell on her feet.
And the text says it cut her feet, her toes off, but I'm going to leave that part out as well.
It fell on her feet, and we'll say she got hurt.
Suddenly just slipped out.
Whoops.
Suffice to say, the people listening to the Buddha, again, were talking about ordinary people, not only people who were meditation practitioners, enlightened beings, and so on.
Some of them were not enlightened by any means.
And some of them had perhaps been harboring suspicions, and now they were very angry at being fooled.
And so these people got up and chased her out of the monastery, beating her, hitting her, and so on.
And the story goes that she went to hell.
The story goes the earth opened up underneath her feet and swallowed her whole, but either way I think it's fair to assume that she did in fact go to hell as a result.
That's the story.
The Buddha tells a past life story where a similar thing happened.
It's an interesting story, but that's for another day.
I encourage you if you're interested to read the Jataka stories associated with these.
But we're going to get into the lesson.
I'm much more interested in what this means to us as meditators and Buddhists.
So again, I think there are two different lessons.
The first one relates, I think that's interesting to us, relates to
prosperity.
And how remarkable it is that people think, as these wandering recluses thought, that you can become prosperous through evil, that somehow evil deeds, lies in this case,
and worse than lies, malicious lies, designed to harm someone, to greatly harm someone.
The idea that that could lead to prosperity is quite remarkable.
And so it brings a broader question to the fore about prosperity through evil in general.
I mean, isn't it true that a person
who does an evil deed, prospers?
It's a trick question, I suppose.
But it's an argument that's put forward.
I mean, well, certainly true that a person who steals gains, right?
In the short term, of course, the arguments are, there are other arguments involved, but
There's a question of karma, because if a person steals from you, well, I didn't.
Why did they, the person who did the bad deed, gain, and why do I, the person who never did any bad deed, lose?
So the broader picture, of course, would tell us more, but more to the point, I think we have to understand that we have to ask the question of whether the theft
is that which allowed for the profit.
And so I think, I want to explain this because I think it's more than that.
And this helps us understand karma and it helps us understand things like meditation even.
Because to say that the theft is what allowed the person, the thief to prosper, is actually missing a lot of the story.
Because if you talk about what it takes to steal,
Take two people.
One person is incompetent and the other person is competent.
One person is clever, the other person is not clever.
So take these two people and ask yourself, which one is going to succeed in stealing?
Which one is more likely to succeed more often in stealing, in doing any bad deed, right?
Take a weak person and a strong person.
Which one is going to succeed in things like torture or rape or that sort of thing?
So what I'm getting at here is these are actually all positive qualities, physical and mental qualities that differentiate beings.
And putting aside physical qualities, we just focus on mental qualities.
A thief needs things like confidence.
So what we're actually talking about is capabilities.
And if you want to think of it, karma is kind of, we talk about the karma bank and people wonder whether karma is like a bank that you put money in.
In a way it kind of is, as long as we understand what we mean by karma and by the bank.
But if you think of it as like a system of points, merit and demerit points,
What they really are is abilities or capabilities.
If you practice meditation, you become more confident.
There's these books that teach you how to be confident, and they'll tell you to recite mantras like, I can do it, I can do it, that sort of thing.
They'll tell you all sorts of things, but you'll find that most often it's a sort of meditation.
It's a means of mental development.
If you want to be focused, the person who's not focused would make a very bad evildoer because you have to focus on the task at hand and not get distracted and you have to be composed or else you'll tell the wrong person and get found out and that sort of thing.
And all of these things come from not only meditation, but they come actually from good deeds.
A person who does lots of good deeds for others is going to become more confident and stronger of mind.
If you look conversely to what things like theft do for a person,
Does theft make you more confident and more focused?
Does it make you happier?
I think it's a question we have to ask because you say, well, the person got what they wanted.
They got what they wanted because they had the capabilities.
They didn't get it because they stole it.
They got it because they were capable.
They were in a position to steal it.
And they chose.
But the act of stealing, what are the results of that?
Because there's no question here from a Buddhist perspective that the stealing was a bad act.
And it will only have bad consequences.
So the stealing itself, the consequences for the mind are quite profound.
I once tried to teach meditation to a thief, a guy who was guilty of theft, and I don't think he ever got caught for it, but he couldn't sit still.
He was really in a bad state.
His mind was totally unfocused.
I always bring up Crime and Punishment.
This novel, I think, sums it up quite well.
If you do very, very evil deeds, there's no escaping them.
And of course many other things, of course, you can get caught and you'll be tortured and punished and so on.
And another interesting aspect is you make the world a worse place.
A person who, take a thief.
A thief is someone who likes the things of this world, who wants them, who craves them.
Not all thieves, but the average thief is desperate, so desperate for the things of this world.
that they will steal them.
They will take them against the wishes of others.
And so their attachment to this world is certainly going to keep them in this world.
And by being a thief, have they made the world a better place?
No.
A world with thieves, is it better or worse?
I think there's no question that it's worse.
Just from the sense of people are less comfortable, they lock their doors.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere, and we never locked our doors.
And we always bragged about it.
But I thought often as a kid about that.
You know, we would visit the city and they would lock their doors and we think, wow, people actually lock their doors in places.
Never, we didn't have to, you know, the nearest neighbor was a mile away.
They didn't lock their doors either.
When you start locking your doors and worrying about your kids and, you know, you have to worry about young girls for the worst reasons, right?
You have to guard your money, guard your bank accounts, guard your internet, guard everything.
This is what the world does to us.
This is what evil does to the world.
And guess who inherits the world?
Those people who are desperate enough for it that they're willing to go to extremes.
They're the ones who are sure to be here or even in worse places.
That's another topic.
So this idea of prosperity, I think it's an interesting lesson for us to think about and to acknowledge that there are people and that there is this perversion in the world and even in our minds that we can gain from doing things that are not a source of gain.
The second lesson, and so the more to the point one, is about lying.
And the Buddha says that lying is, lying is something, is like a gate.
It's like a line in the sand.
It's a line that, once crossed, leads to all kinds of evil.
The person who is willing to lie,
Two things, I guess, and we have to talk about them both.
The first one is they've thrown away their future.
is someone who has thrown away their afterlife.
What that means is any hope for heaven, any hope for prosperity in their next life, they throw it away.
It's a pretty harsh one, just from lying.
I think one reason for giving this teaching is because it's probably often overlooked.
You know, we talk about killing and stealing, those are really bad, right?
What about lying?
We think, well, it can't be as bad as killing or stealing, right?
But karma is an interesting thing.
I don't think the Buddha is saying that it is the worst evil.
that lying is the worst thing you could possibly do.
But he's saying something interesting, that lying is a line.
And it is.
It's different from other kinds of evil.
If you kill or hurt someone, that's quite a straightforward act.
I mean, it's an act out of anger, and it's in the person's face.
If you steal, it's often, sometimes you can steal, hit someone in the face and take their lunch money, but more often you do it in secret.
So that's an invasion, and that's, I think, in some sense, worse than physical violence, because it's deceitful, or not quite the right word, but it's an unknown, it's something you can't face.
A person who steals from you, it's just suddenly the thing that you owned was gone.
That can be devastating.
It can feel very devastating to people.
But neither of these are like a lie in the sense that a lie goes against the truth.
A lie is a disregard for the value of the truth, maligning the truth.
which from a Buddhist perspective is an important thing in some ways more important than pain or possession you know without the truth and it's not like a person who lies to you can deceive you about the world I mean they can if you're young and impressionable but the idea of a lie and what it represents is very important and so
The idea is that there's this sense that a person who's willing to malign the truth, who is a distorter of truth, and not just a distorter, a denier, a reverser, someone who reverses, who makes a true statement, who changes what is true into what is false.
It's like this, they say it's not like this.
This is a negation of the truth.
is some kind of special, some kind of special thing because it relates.
I mean, it's all psychological.
The idea is that there's a psychology behind this, that a person who does this is then
unequipped or is hurting their ability, their psychological, their mental ability, mental capacity to tell the difference between true and false.
The results of lying are to create a nebulous or vague or uncertain state of reality.
And so other deeds like killing, no other truths like killing is wrong, stealing is wrong, become suspect, become vague.
There's not this certainty.
You can tell because
when you undertake to practice never to lie.
And again by lie we don't mean lies of omission, we don't mean even deception where you trick someone into thinking something.
We mean where you actually say X is not X, Y is not Y, not Y is Y, that sort of thing.
And so being able to see right from wrong becomes problematic.
And that's what the Buddha is getting at here.
And it's interesting.
There's no question that there is a line being crossed when you lie.
I mean, it's a very powerful practice to never lie.
And it makes your mind very strong and very devoted to truth, to reality.
It's a very special kind of evil to lie.
Something we shouldn't take for granted.
Certainly the Buddha didn't think so.
Of course, this story has more to it than just a lie, right?
It's a malicious lie.
Some lies are, you could argue, you're not going to be, the earth isn't going to swallow you up whole just for lying.
So there's no question that this was more than just a lie.
It was a devastating, evil, wicked, malicious lie.
And there was a lot more involved.
It was quite a workup.
She spent months planning and plotting.
Could you imagine all the bad karma she was cultivating in her mind?
It's like a nine-month meditation.
She did a nine-month meditation course on evil.
That's what it takes to swallow you up, culminating in the final act of lying in front of the Buddha and accusing the Buddha of something pretty serious.
Not like he raped her or something, but it's pretty serious for a monk and for a religious teacher to be accused of sleeping with a woman and so on.
Understanding karma, understanding that there is something very real about good and bad karma.
And understanding the nature of truth, that truth is important.
And lies are very bad because of how important the truth is.
We're not in Buddhism concerned about belief or even hard work.
The only hard work we should be doing is to understand the truth.
And so lies are very, very bad for that.
Something we should never engage in.
And that's the Dhammapada for tonight.
So thank you all for tuning in.
Wish you all the best.