Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse 115, which reads as follows.
Yoja vasatsatang jiwe apasang dhammamuttamang ekahang jiwitang seyo pasato dhammamuttamang
which is the last in our series of verses about how it is better to live one day and see the truth than to live a hundred years and not see the truth.
Here the word is Dhammamuttamang.
So better is it to live one day seeing the Dhammamuttamang, the highest Dhamma, or the pinnacle of Dhammas.
Than to live a hundred years and never see, never get to the top.
Never find the ultimate truth.
You could translate Dhammamuttamang as ultimate truth.
So this story is about, this verse is told in regards to the story about Bahu Putika.
Bahu Putika, a woman who had many bahu.
So she had seven sons and seven daughters.
And she was well off.
She was wealthy.
And her children all got married.
Her sons found wives.
Her daughters found husbands.
And they lived happily and at peace with each other.
And then it happened that her husband passed away and she became the owner, the possessor of all of his property.
So she was wealthy at that point and she started to get older and her children grew up and I guess had children of their own.
And they started to tell her that she should hand over control of her wealth to them.
Let them look after her well, so divvy it up, divide it up between the 14 children and let them take care of her.
They would be able, because she wouldn't have to manage her own finances and so on, look after things.
So give everything up to her children and let them look after her because they would, of course, look after her.
And she thought to herself, of course, what need have I of wealth?
My children will look after me.
So she split it up.
And there's a word, if you're reading along with the English, I have to explain because it's translated wrongly.
So she split it into half, which was confusing to me since there's 14 of them.
But it says , means in the middle.
So it's either in midst of them, she split it up among them, or she split it evenly means evenly.
So she split it into 14 parts is quite clear.
Seven sons and seven daughters.
But the nature of wealth is an interesting thing.
And from the time at first, she was well taken care of by all of her sons and daughters and their families.
But then eventually, but not eventually after some short time, her she would go to one of her one of her son's houses.
And they would support her for a while and then they would start to complain.
Oh, what, did she give us more of her wealth that we have to take care of her more than everyone else?
And she would hear this sort of thing, and feeling embarrassed, she would go to another of her children's houses.
But it became a point where they began to fight, they began to bicker, they began to complain.
Anytime she relied upon any of them for support, they would resent it, thinking, why isn't she going to someone else's house?
Why are we the ones who have to take care of her?
She only gave us a portion.
This is what happens when you bring money into the picture.
It's why I would never encourage, obviously I would never do myself, but also never encourage people to mix the Dhamma with money, like charging for it, or even if your intention is pure, trying to make a living off of something.
It's just mixing two things, family and money.
When a person dies, an inheritance is to be split up.
It can create bitter and terrible enemies out of siblings.
This happens often.
I hear about how horrible it becomes when people feel unfairly treated, or they're fighting and they sue each other over their inheritance, ridiculous things like this.
Money has the potential to destroy a lot of things.
Not by itself, by itself.
It's just paper and numbers and metal and that kind of thing.
Wealth is just stuff.
But the significance and the hold it has, the concept of wealth, the concept of power, the concept of affluence,
and all the comfort that it promises, you know, is intoxicating and it destroys people.
So these people literally or absolutely drove their mother to poverty because she suddenly had no support from any of them.
Rather than being
Rather than thinking of her as their mother, they just thought of her as the person who gave us one fourteenth of her wealth.
And suddenly this became more important than the fact that she was their mother, which is absurd.
But that sort of thing does happen in the world, crazy as it sounds.
And so she got fed up.
She looked at this and she lost all desire to be involved in this terrible mess of her family.
And so she became a nun.
And that's her story.
It's actually not so related to the verse.
But this is the story of a very wonderful story of...
I mean, a terrible story, but wonderful in the sense of how she overcame it, how she persevered, and kind of remarkable in regards to how terrible people can be to such a nice person, a person who ostensibly was a very good and kind and caring mother who was naive enough to think that her children were as nice as she and would take care of her.
So she became a nun and went to practice and she said to herself, I've become a nun in old age and so I should devote myself to heedfulness.
And so she decided that she would spend the whole night in meditation, not sleeping.
And so she would do walking meditation and she was doing walking meditation all night
by holding on to a tree branch or a fallen tree and doing walking back and forth.
And she made a determination to herself, I will fulfill the Dhamma of the Buddha, the Dhamma of the teacher.
I will fulfill the teacher's teaching.
I will do the dhammas of the samana, of a samana, a shaman, or a recluse.
And she made the determination.
I will do the dhamma that is taught by the teacher.
I will perform the Dhammas.
So she was meticulous in this.
And the Buddha found out about this, very simple story, that the Buddha found out about this and taught her this verse and said, indeed, it's better to see the Dhamma for one moment than to live a hundred years and never see it.
And as he taught her, she focused her mind and she was delighted with his teaching.
And so it gave her encouragement.
And based on that encouragement, she was able to become an arahat, become enlightened.
And see the Dhamma Muttama, the highest Dhamma.
This one is really probably the most powerful of these ones that we've been looking at now.
Maybe not the most instructive because it deals with nibbana which is not all that useful for a meditator to consider.
Being ineffable, not something you can talk about or think about.
In fact, I think it scares a lot of new meditators.
What will happen to me if I attain that?
So it's more like the result of letting go.
It's not something to be considered too much but
The power of this verse is in the fact that this is the clearest truth, the clearest version of this verse, that you could live countless lifetimes.
And it's all meaningless.
It never reaches this highest Dhamma, that it's possible to live countless lifetimes without ever reaching the pinnacle.
And that's how we live our lives.
And it's an important point to make that Buddhism is really geared towards attaining something that we've never attained in all our lives, in all the realms of samsara, something that we've missed.
we are like the plains dwellers who see the mountain up high or maybe see the foot of the mountain but never venture to its peak and the key here is that it's
is better categorically preferable because without seeing the highest Dhamma you do just run around on the plains and you're born again and again and again and it's a defining moment when you attain Nibbana because at that moment you've changed the course of your existence you've shifted categorically
to the realm of clarity and vision and understanding whereas before for most people we just run around based on on instincts and habits and partialities and culture and what we're used to
without ever really waking up and examining or looking at what we're doing to ourselves.
We just follow and chase after things that are pleasurable, run away from things that are unpleasant.
But seeing Nibbana changes that.
It wakes you up and you see clearly and
You're able to know when, know what you're doing to yourself.
You're able to see the desire and see the aversion.
And as a result, you're able to clean it out once and for all.
So that's the highest dhamma, to change.
to change because we no matter how much we change without seeing the highest dhamma it's always the same you become a better person sometimes and then you become a worse person back and forth we just go around and around there's no
It's kind of like being in the ocean.
In the ocean there are no landmarks, there are no signs, there is nothing that stands out, nothing that is exceptional.
It's all just water, no matter where you go you can say I'm here, I'm here, I'm here.
In the end it's all just ocean.
But if you compare it to dry land, it's categorically different.
Our lives as human beings, as beings, it's just like being in a great ocean.
It's all just water.
No matter what you become, you become a king, well then you die and become worm food.
You can become a great motivational speaker, you can become a politician, you can become a religious leader and teach people good things, and then in the end it's just wiped out.
You can teach people to become good people and then they're good people for a while,
And then they die and they forget about it and they might become bad people again.
So we have this categorical change.
We have something that is beyond that.
And that is the Dhammamuttamang.
So absolutely, this is the one that makes the most impression, I think.
If you see it just for one moment, all it takes is to see Nibbana for one moment and it changes completely how you look at the universe.
You wake up, you feel like you were asleep before, dead and now you're alive.
These are the sort of things that people say once they've seen Nibbana.
So that's all.
That's the teaching for today.
Something that's useful for our meditation in that it emphasizes and it reminds us of the emphasis on Nibbana and reminds us of how important it is and how great it is.
It's not something to be feared, certainly.
It's something to be realized.
It's the highest dhamma.
that we have only two alternatives to run around chasing after mundane dhamma mundane truths which are mostly relative or we can we can strive for the ultimate truth the truth that doesn't change the truth that is unassailable that is unchanging
that is stable and satisfying not controllable but not self but peace so that's the dhammapada for tonight thank you all for tuning in wishing you all the best