Okay, welcome back to our study of the Dhamma Pandita.
Today we continue on with verse number 64, which reads as follows.
yāvajīvampi jebālo panditam payirupāsati naṣo dhammāṁ vijānāti dambhi suparasangyatā
Which means, a fool who for his whole life attends upon or associates with a wise person,
Such a person, such a fool, even though they spend their whole life with the wise person, doesn't realize the Dhamma for themselves.
Just as the spoon in the soup doesn't taste the soup.
So this is a story, a verse based on a story, another very short story of the Venerable Udayi, who was, I guess, a bit of a fool.
I'm not sure if this is Lal Udayi or just another Udayi, but he's one of those people who never really caught on to the actual teaching.
He may not have been a bad monk, but he just kind of stuck around.
He didn't really have a clue as to what the Buddha taught and certainly hadn't realized it for himself.
But when the elders left the Dhamma hall,
And there was nobody around.
He liked to go and sit up in the Dhammasana, the Dhamma chair.
They have a special chair where someone, when they're giving a Dhamma talk, sits so that even a younger monk would be sitting higher than the senior monks for the time that they were giving the Dhamma talk.
So whoever's teaching the Dhamma, they would have them sit higher as a show of respect.
And so he used to go and sit on it and pretend like he was some great elder and he knew what he was doing.
So one day he's doing this and a bunch of visiting monks come in and they see him up on the Dhamma chair and they think, oh, this must be some great elder.
And so they all go up and they sit around him and ask him all sorts of questions about
It says about the aggregates and very deep subjects, about the five aggregates and the twelve ayatana, the twelve bases and the eighteen datas, the eighteen elements.
I ask him all sorts of questions.
He's like, I don't know.
He turns out to be a fool and not have any answers.
And the other monks are appalled because the monastery where he was staying was the monastery of the Buddha.
So he said to themselves, how can it be?
Here you are.
How long have you been a monk?
And I guess he was an elder, so he'd been a monk for at least 10 years or at least he had been there for some time.
And they were appalled that he had been with the Buddha all that time and hadn't learned anything.
And so...
criticizing him, they went over to pay respect to the Buddha.
They waited until the appropriate time and made an appointment to see the Buddha and went in and paid respect to the Buddha and said, Venerable Sir, there's this monk and he's sitting up in the Dhamma chair and we asked him all these questions and he hadn't a clue.
And we're thinking, how could it be that someone who'd been with you so long, living in the same monastery as the Blessed One himself,
still wasn't able to realize the Dhamma for himself.
He had no clue about the Dhamma.
And the Buddha taught him, gave him his teaching and spoke this verse.
He said, even if a fool, even if they live together with wise people for a hundred years,
Because they're a fool, they never realize the Dhamma, no matter how much time they spend.
And then he said it's just like the spoon.
When you put a spoon in the soup, it never has an opportunity to taste the soup, no matter if you keep it in the soup for 100 years.
So that's the verse and that's the story and that's the verse.
The actual teaching behind it is obviously more generally applicable than just the story.
It's a caution to us.
And some people might even be surprised that this is possible.
How could it be that you could spend so much time, even your whole life, with wise people and never become wise?
And the analogy of the spoon and the soup is quite apt.
It's because of the nature of the people.
If a person is of a nature to be cruel and lustful and arrogant and deluded and all these bad things, so performs unwholesome acts and is unwholesome in their speech and unguarded in their behavior and
unwholesome in the mind.
If they are inclined towards unwholesomeness then physical presence doesn't help them.
You see this acutely with even people who can answer questions and do have knowledge of the Dhamma.
People who studied a lot but have never practiced can
can still inside be incredibly clueless to the truth, unenlightened inside.
So they actually have trouble answering questions in a cogent fashion.
They aren't able to put together the Buddha's teaching into a way that's understandable because they themselves don't understand it.
So when asked deep questions, even people who have studied a lot, it's easy to tell whether they have or not practiced based on their ability to explain the teaching in a cogent manner.
Meditation is really the key.
I always try to bring these videos back to our meditation practice.
And it's the meditation that allows you to taste the soup, so to speak.
If a person isn't practicing the teachings, it's like reading a map but never driving, or reading the driver's manual and never actually getting behind the wheel.
our knowledge of the Buddhist teaching and even our rational understanding and agreement of the Buddhist teaching.
It's similar to any philosophy where you will find philosophers passionately arguing for a certain philosophy but not following it themselves.
It's like doctors who smoke cigarettes or themselves have poor health habits.
It's this kind of
hypocrisy is one way of putting it, but it can just be a superficial understanding or a lack of understanding.
I mean, there are many reasons for this.
There are monks who
become monks for the wrong reason.
They ordain because they have nowhere else to go, there are social outcasts and so on.
In Asian countries it's often poor people who ordain like as novices.
Novices will become novices not because they have this keen interest at seven years old to become enlightened but because at seven years old they don't have enough food to eat and their parents can't feed them so they go
to the monastery and they're promised a meal and shelter and getting off on the wrong foot like this they grow up in the wrong way and by the time they become monks they're in there it's entrained in their mind they're they're trained in the wrong way they're set in being a career monk and as a result they don't have the inclination or the they're inured you can say against against the realization
Inured, I don't know if that's the right word.
I'm looking for a word like insulated against it.
They're not able to realize it because of the... No, they're... Inured, I think, is the word.
But they're far from it.
They're not able to...
connect with the Dhamma because their way of thinking about it is as a livelihood and as an intellectual pursuit or as a culture.
There's so much ingrained in them that is wrong.
The way the Buddha said it's... I think the Buddha said or also was one of the commentaries that it's harder to remove right view than it is to remove wrong view.
Paraphrasing.
But the point is a person with wrong view, you can teach them meditation quite easily because their wrong view is very easy to change.
When they realize how wrong they are, they give up and they follow the teaching.
But a person who has right view and who knows all the truth intellectually,
It's very hard to teach because no matter what you say, they say, yes, I know that.
Yes, yes, yes, I know.
And they don't realize that actually they don't really know what they're talking about.
They know everything, but they know nothing.
And then there are monks who are corrupt, who are just using it as a livelihood or even engaging in evil practices.
And then there are just people who never get it.
I mean for most of us it's very difficult.
We were talking last night about the four types of lotus.
There are just some people who will never get the Dhamma, never realize it.
Maybe their minds are in the wrong place.
But
That's too discouraging.
I think that's not really what we're talking about here.
We're talking about people who don't want to learn, people who are foolish, who are engaged in wasting their time and who are too lazy to actually put the teachings into practice.
Again, it's not a criticism or it's not really... I don't want to go around pointing fingers, but it's an admonishment to all of us to take this seriously, that we should never be complacent just because we're Buddhists or obviously just because we're monks.
I think that's often the case.
There are people who think that just because we're monks we're perfect.
Of course, then there's the opposite case, people who don't ever give monks a break.
and are always criticizing the smallest faults in monks.
I know there's people like that who don't realize how difficult it is to be a monk.
But it certainly isn't enough.
It's not enough to call ourselves Buddhist.
Lay people are the same.
It's very easy to become complacent, thinking that I'm Buddhist now and that's enough.
It's certainly not enough.
The Buddha said a person can live their whole life with a wise person and never become wise.
It has all to do with our own practice.
Good companions are only useful if we emulate them, if we follow them, if we learn from them.
Otherwise we become a burden on them and they're better off without us.
So our practice of cultivating wholesome actions, wholesome speech, wholesome thoughts, and cultivating wisdom, the burden is all placed on us.
It's at every moment, how we act, how we speak, how we think, whether we have mindfulness, whether we have
awareness, whether we're cultivating insight and wisdom for ourselves.
That's the determination of whether we taste the soup.
Otherwise we're just like a spoon.
You can be surrounded by the teachings but never realize the teachings for yourself.
Still not a bad thing.
There's lots of good that can come from being surrounded by the Buddha's teaching and being a monk and so on.
But to realize the Buddha's teaching, you have to practice for yourself.
Buddha said, even the Buddha is just one who shows the way.
It's us who have to walk the path.
So simple teaching, something as a reminder for us, and it's a nice analogy for us to remember the simile of the spoon in the soup.
Tomorrow we have the other side of the coin, those who can taste the soup.
So tune in, not tomorrow, next time.
So tune in next time.
Thank you all for keeping up and for the positive feedback.
I appreciate it.
And I'm glad to know that these videos are a benefit.
I wish for everyone out there to be able to put the teachings of the Buddha into practice and find true peace, happiness and freedom from suffering.
Thank you.