Okay, hello and welcome to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue with verse number 40, which reads as follows.
Which means,
having seen or having known the body to be like a pot, having established or fortified this mind like a city.
may you fight with Mara using the weapon of wisdom.
And then once you are victorious, may you guard your victory without clinging.
So this verse was taught in regards to a large number of bhikkhus.
The story is of a large number of bhikkhus.
It says 500 bhikkhus, but you can think that that's probably just an estimate.
learned how to practice meditation from the Buddha and went off to practice meditation in the forest.
And they found this place that was quite suitable and the people there asked them to stay and built them a place to stay in the nearby forest.
And so they decided that for the three months of the rains, or for this period of time that they were going to practice meditation, they would stay there and try to develop insight meditation and become enlightened.
And it so happened that in this forest there were a great number of angels living.
And the Buddhist tradition is that in general angels like to live in forests because they are such quiet and peaceful and delightful places if you're an angel.
But the angels, when they saw these monks coming who were, you could say, in some sense worthy of respect because of the purity of their morality and their behavior, these angels felt that, maybe as a cultural thing, that they couldn't stay up in the trees while the monks were living down at the roots of the trees.
And so they said to themselves, well, these monks are here, we'll have to take our families and move down to the roots of the trees.
And it's okay because we'll just wait for the monks to leave.
They'll probably just come here to stay for one night.
Humans don't like to stay in forests.
So probably after one night they'll leave and go home and then we can go back up into the trees.
So out of respect for these monks, today they agreed that they would stay down at the bottoms of the trees.
In the morning the monks practiced meditation and laid into the night and after taking a rest in the morning they got up and went for alms round into the village and then they came back into the forest and the angels saw them coming back and thought, oh, well, maybe they're going to stay
a couple of days.
And they said, well, that's okay.
Soon enough they'll leave.
Tomorrow they'll leave.
And every day they went like this, kind of postponing it and eventually getting more and more concerned about this.
Until finally after 15 days they said to themselves, you know, look, these monks aren't going anywhere.
We have to do something.
We have to get rid of them.
Because we can't live here down at the bottoms of the trees.
This is not comfortable for us.
And so they, in order to get rid of these monks who were ardently at work practicing meditation,
When the monks were doing walking meditation, they would come and appear in front of them as headless corpses, or they would somehow telepathically, or somehow produce these visions, so that the monks had all these visions of headless corpses and floating heads and things.
And when they would do sitting meditation at night, they would make noises like screaming and moaning and wailing like ghosts.
and totally disturbed these monks' meditation.
After a day or two of this, the monks found that they were unable to concentrate.
They were totally freaked out by these noises.
And they decided that this was not a suitable meditation place for them.
And so, agreeing amongst themselves, the monks decided that they would head back to Jetavana, where the Buddha was staying.
And so they went something like a hundred leagues back to where the Buddha was staying.
came to the Buddha and the Buddha said, what, are you not staying at that place?
And they said, we can't stay there.
It's full of ghosts and evil spirits that are stopping us from practicing meditation.
And the Buddha said, look, he really, he thought about it and he considered with his mental powers and considered that was indeed the best place and really the only place that these monks could go that would bring them meditation, bring them insight.
They would have to face this.
This was their karma and they had to face this in order to become enlightened.
So he said, look, really you have to go back there.
This is the advice that I have for you and this is the path that you have to follow.
And they said, how are we supposed to meditate?
We can't fight with this.
We can't possibly combat this sort of enemy.
And the Buddha said, ah, but you see, when you went last time, you didn't have a weapon.
You didn't have the right weapon.
This time I'm going to send you with a weapon.
And he said, and they said, well, what is the weapon?
Please tell us.
And so the Buddha, which is actually a very famous story, because this is where the Buddha taught them what we call the Karaniya Metta Sutta.
He said to them, you didn't have a weapon last time.
Now what I want you to do, from the time when you see the Awasa, the forest, the Aranya,
start chanting before you get into it.
Start chanting the verses that I will teach you and chant all the way into the forest.
Chant to yourselves, out loud, all of you.
and so on, which goes according to the Karaniyamita Sutta.
A person who is skilled and knows what is wholesome, this is what they should do.
They should be sako juja sujuja.
They should be upright.
They should be capable and upright.
Sujuja, suvajo, they should be easy to admonish.
And so on.
And then they should think to themselves, May all beings be happy within themselves, be at peace within themselves.
And then he was on, the sutta goes on and on.
And this is a very famous sutta that we will always chant as a protection for ourselves and as a protection for other people.
And as a means of producing wholesome thoughts and wholesome mind states.
So the Buddha said, you chant this.
It talks about all beings, ditawa, yeja, atita, beings that you can see, beings that you can't see, dhule, vasante, avidhule, beings that are far away, beings that are near.
You should send loving kindness, sabbe satta, bhavantu, sukha tattam.
Napalo palang ni kubheta, you should not be angry or upset.
Or you should not do anything that wise people would fault.
You should not be angry at anyone.
And you should... You should develop loving kindness for the whole world.
And so on and so on.
And it ends with... If a person develops loving kindness in this way with right view...
Without going to wrong view, someone with morality and vision will not come to be born again.
They will not come to be born in the womb again.
So this was the suit that the Buddha gave them as a protection.
And so they took this, they memorized it, and then they went back, walking all the way.
And when they got near the forest, they said to themselves, now we start.
And they started to chant this.
And the angels, when they heard this, because of course it's Pali, and at the time in Magadha, the angels could understand what they were saying.
They didn't have to take Pali classes.
and they understood, and they came down, and they listened to it.
And when they heard these beautiful words, and wise words, they were so impressed, and they wanted to hear what this teaching was.
And so they came out, they appeared as angels, and they came out, and they took the monks' bowls, and they swept the monks' dwellings, and they washed the monks' feet, and decided to take care of these monks.
And from that point on, they took it upon themselves to care for these monks.
And they said, of course, there was no evil sound to be heard in the whole forest.
and as a result they were able to dedicate themselves to meditation practice.
Now this is the background story.
This is how this verse came to be.
But the importance of the verse is in regards to what happened next.
This wasn't why the Buddha taught the verse that I said in the beginning.
The reason the Buddha taught the verse is once they started practicing meditation, the Buddha kept his divine eye
He was able to, he was clairaudient.
He was able to hear things far away.
He was clairvoyant.
He was able to see things far away.
He could see what the monks were doing and he could read people's minds and know what was going on.
So he was watching them from time to time and then he saw that they were beginning to see exactly what this verse says.
This body is like a pot.
So they would go on
on alms round and come back and have to sweep and so on and they saw that the body was liable to be broken and so on and they began to develop vipassana insight when they did sitting meditation they were able to see the rising and the falling of the stomach and the breath disintegrating and falling apart and the pains in the body coming and going and the stiffness and sickness and so on
And this became a real contemplation for many of them.
Maybe they were, you might think that they were discussing it as well, and it became a subject of meditation.
And so the Buddha came to them and said, came to them, you could say, sent forth a vision for them, and they were able to see the Buddha.
And he said, indeed, this is the truth, that the body is like a pot, like a pot that is easily broken and just waiting to fall apart.
And it's not possible to protect it.
But you should protect the mind and you should fortify the mind.
You should not worry to fortify the body.
Don't concern yourself with the body, but fortify the mind like a city.
fight with Mara, fight with the evil that is inside you and in the world around you using wisdom.
And then once you have defeated Mara, then you should protect your mind, protect your victory without cleaning.
This is the verse that I
So, the importance that this has for our meditation, obviously this is a Vipassana meditation teaching intrinsically.
It's something that the Buddha taught to a group of monks who were dedicating themselves to meditation.
And it was a meditation of life.
Through hearing the Buddha give this teaching, they were able to dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to the practice and became arahat, became enlightened.
So it's quite important for us to understand and to put into practice these very brief words that we have to understand through explanation.
So the first part is the understanding of dukkha, really, the understanding of anityang dukkhang anatta, the impermanent suffering and non-self that we see in everything, not only the body.
The reason why we start with the body is because it is our door to experience reality.
Everything, the whole of the universe is experienced through the body.
Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling.
Besides our thoughts, all of our experience occurs through the body.
So we take the body as really our base meditation object.
And so this is why...
When we begin to practice, the first thing we will begin to see is that the body is like a pot, or the body is even like a bubble.
The physical form is like a bubble.
The Buddha said it's like a mirage, like something that
look stable, but when you examine it, you see how fragile, how easy it is to break up.
So this is an expression of seeing impermanence.
This is really, it exists on two levels.
The first level is, as the Buddha says, viditva means having seen.
So in the past, even before you start practicing, one of the main reasons for practicing is even without meditation, you come to see that the body is like a pot.
You come to see the fragility of life.
You come to see that everything is subject to impermanence, is subject to change, is unsatisfying, is uncontrollable.
You don't have to practice meditation to appreciate that.
So this is why people come to practice meditation in the first place.
It's because they have come to see old age, they have come to see sickness, they have come to see death, either in themselves or in someone else.
They've come to realize that no matter how careful you are to protect the body and to make a stable life in the world around you,
In the end, the very nature of existence is to change, is to fall apart.
Everything you build up will eventually fall apart and disappear.
The body is fragile and unreliable.
the body, also the mind, and the whole world.
Everything that you cling to, all of the physical objects that you say are mine or my possession, in the end you have to give them away.
So this is the first level.
The second level is once you start to practice.
And then not only philosophically you can say that the body is something that is fragile, but you can see that the whole of existence is not made up of entities.
It's not made up of a body and legs and so on.
When you reach the beginning of vipassana insight, you can see that actually reality is made up of experiences.
When you experience a feeling of tension in the legs or tension in the back, heat in the body, this is reality.
When you begin to practice and when you begin to develop insight, sometimes the whole body will seem like it disappeared.
You will feel like your body has somehow ceased to exist.
Because in truth the body never existed in the first place.
And once your concentration gets strong, you will start to wonder where your body went.
You start to feel like you're having some special meditation experience, when actually all you're seeing is the truth, that the body does not exist.
Actually the body is just fragments, just pieces, like a broken pot.
When you watch the stomach, then the body arises.
Rising.
And when it's gone, then it vanishes.
Falling.
As a result of seeing this, this is what gives rise to what we call bhajnana.
It can make one quite disturbed.
It shakes up your whole idea about reality.
It shakes up all attachments, really.
All of your attachments to your life, to your belongings, to your position in society, and...
all of your attachments to so many worldly things, to people, to places, to sensuality, to everything, it becomes broken up because you see that it's not real.
You see that it's not stable.
Reality is simply this, rising, ceasing.
And then this one, arising, ceases.
The in-breath arises, ceases.
Out-breath arises, ceases.
So, seeing the fragility of reality.
This is a very important aspect of vipassana insight.
It's one very good way to understand.
This is really what we're trying to see in the practice.
To see things piece by piece by piece.
To see what is really there.
And to see that it's actually just pieces, like a broken pot.
So as a result you begin to give up the attachment to external objects and you cease to think that you can somehow find stability in the world.
This is the first part.
The second part has to do with the practice and the effort that you put in to maintain what is truly or to develop what is truly beneficial, what is truly sustainable or truly
leading to peace, happiness and freedom from suffering, which is to fortify the mind.
Because the mind you can purify.
The body you can't fix, but the mind you can fix the mind.
You can't stop the body from falling apart and dying, from falling apart and disappearing, going back to the elements.
But the mind, you can purify the mind.
The body will always be full of sickness and putrid bad smells and sights and so on.
It will always be subject to defilement.
but the defilements in the mind you can root out.
So you can protect the mind, you can guard the mind.
It's very important, and it's a very important advice not just for intensive meditators or monastics, but for people in the world as well.
If you're living in the world and you have so many problems with money or with security or with family, with relationships and so on,
Sometimes it seems impossible to work everything out, to make a stable, satisfying environment outside of yourself.
So people always ask the question, what do I do in this case?
They're at a loss for how to solve things, how to make the world around them
stable and reliable.
So the Buddha taught us to give up this idea and to try to instead make the mind stable.
As they say, the home is where the heart is.
So try to make a home inside your heart.
If you can fortify your mind and strengthen your mind, it doesn't really matter what goes on in the world around you.
And if you are able to fortify and strengthen your mind, the world around you will naturally, without any effort, any special effort on your part, become stable and peaceful and
reliable, because you don't have any requirements or expectations, because you cease to create disharmony and stress.
You give up your worries, you give up your concerns, you give up trying to create things.
When we want something, when we cling to something, we build
up our castles, we build up our receptacles, ways of receiving pleasure, ways of receiving what we want to get.
We build a house, we buy a car, we have a family, we have children, all of these ways for us to get pleasant experiences.
And so we build all this up and so many problems come as a result of it.
And you have to protect it, you have to insure it, you have to guard it, you have to maintain it, all of these things.
It's like building up big sand castles and then just waiting for them to crash and fall down.
And when you give all this up, then you give up the idea that it's me, that it's mine, then it doesn't bother you when the sandcastles crash, when things change, and all of these problems.
And you come to see that all of the problems that you have are actually nothing.
They have no right to be called problems in the first place.
They're only problems because you think they are problems.
You think they're mine, you think they're something.
You think they have some intrinsic existence.
When you come to train your mind, you come to give up all of this.
When you actually fortify the mind and take the mind as your home, the mind as your city, your castle.
then these things are unable to affect you, just like a well-fortified city.
The Buddha compared his Dhamma to a city, or enlightenment, you can say, to a city.
And he said, just as a city with four doors that are well-guarded,
Anyone who wants to come into the city has to come in through one of these four doors.
In the same way, a person who practices meditation based on the four foundations of mindfulness, the four satipatthana, then if you can guard just using the four satipatthana, then anything that comes through will have to come through one of the four satipatthana.
Every experience you will be able to see as one of the four satipatthane.
If you have pain, you will see it as pain.
If you have a feeling in the body, you will see it as body.
A movement in the body, you will see it as body.
A thought in the mind, you will see it as mind.
An emotion, you will see it as a dhamma.
A good or bad thing, something that is useful, something that is useless.
Something that is helpful, something that is a hindrance.
And so with this fortified city, this training in mindfulness to not let anything in anywhere else, to not let anything outside of the four foundations of mindfulness arise, meaning to not let the idea of me or mine or good or bad
by training ourselves to just see things in one of these four ways.
It's like guarding the city and only letting something in through one of the four doors.
Not like you have these walls that stop the enemies from coming in.
Buddha said, this is how you fight with Mara.
So Mara is like all the Kilesa that come into the mind.
When you see something and your eye is not guarded, then liking comes in.
If you see something and it's not good, or disliking comes in.
You hear something, your ear is not guarded, liking and disliking can come in.
Judgment, attachment, identification and so on, ego, conceit, views, all of these things can come in because the mind is not guarded.
Because we don't guard the mind like a city, as the Buddha said.
Once you guard the mind like a city, then you can begin to fight with Mara.
And then when the kilesa and the defilements come up, liking, disliking, delusion, greed, anger, delusion come up, you can fight with them.
You can fight with all the different kinds of Maras.
You can fight with the evil of the body, old age, sickness, death.
You can fight with the kilesa, defilements.
You can fight even with your own bad karma.
If you've done bad deeds before, you have a way of overcoming the bad deeds.
If you've hurt other people or so on, you have a way to become free from these bad karmas that you've done.
So when a person comes back and attacks you for bad things you've done, you'll be able to respond peacefully.
You will not continue it.
You hurt someone, they hurt you, you hurt them back and so on.
This will stop.
because we will give it up based on the fortification of the mind.
So our practice is the training of the mind.
We're not trying to train the body.
We're not trying to save our ways of life.
We're only trying to save the mind.
My teacher used to say, we spend all sorts of money
We spend all sorts of money to save our body parts.
So if you have a problem with an organ or you have a problem with a limb or something or some part of the body, you'll spend lots and lots of money.
You'll spend all of your money to save it.
If it means losing your hand, you'll give away all your money just to save your hand.
If it means an organ, a heart, a liver or so on, you'll put all your money just to save that organ.
But we will even give up our organs if it means we can save our lives.
So we will give up a limb, or we will give up even an eye, or a kidney, or something that as long as we're able to, as a result, continue to live.
And so my teacher said, but in Buddhism, or in truth, we should...
If we consider it carefully, we should be willing to give up our money, our body parts and even our life in order to save our mind.
So if you ask yourself what is truly important, if you're able to save your mind from defilement,
If it means to lose your life in order to save the mind, in order to keep your mind pure, to keep your mind clear, and to not give rise to defilements, then you should go to save the mind.
So this is really what we're concerned about, to fortify the mind.
And fortify the mind means the practice of mindfulness.
So as I said, to filter everything through one of the four foundations, one of the four satipatthanas.
then we can fight with Mara.
So what does it mean to fight with Mara?
It means this practice of
guarding the senses.
And actually more than that, to build up the fortifications in the mind so that the mind is naturally clear about every experience.
When you see something, your mind is guarded, means you see it just as seeing.
The Buddha said, When you see, let it just be seeing.
When you hear, let it just be hearing.
When you feel something, let it just be feeling.
This is with the weapon of wisdom, the weapon of seeing things clearly as they are.
So when something arises, you see it clearly as it is, not liking or disliking, not identifying it.
By training yourself in this way, this is how you overcome Mara.
Why?
Because the mind begins to understand things in a new way.
So once you look and you spend time again and again training yourself to see things in this way, it begins to be, it's a knowledge that comes.
This is wisdom, panna.
So that later when you see something, already you understand it.
When someone yells at you,
You understand this.
This is sound touching my ear and then in the mind, whatever the mind's going to come up with, that's where the problem is going to come.
So you just watch it and you say, oh, now there's sound and there's no reason.
Why should I give rise to anger?
I know what anger does.
I understand it.
I have wisdom.
So when anger comes up, it leads to suffering.
When they say something good to you, you don't get happy about it either.
You say, I know what that leads to.
Then it leads to greed and attachment and conceit.
And I think that I'm a good person because they're complimenting me and so on.
And you give up all of that through wisdom.
This is the weapon of wisdom.
The Buddha said, wisdom is the greatest of all virtues.
Just like the moon outshines all stars in the sky, so wisdom outshines all virtues.
For this reason, because it can deal with any problem.
Whatever problem you have, you understand it to be only an experience, to not be a problem anymore.
And then he says, then he warns us that we should never be negligent once we have come to fortify the mind.
Because the fortification is to cultivate the practice, to develop the ability to practice.
And then he says you have to guard this.
A person who is training on the path to enlightenment has to come to maintain this state.
It often happens that people come to practice meditation, they develop this ability to meditate, and then they go home and then they forget it all, at least for some time, and then all of the problems come back, because they aren't able to maintain this state.
They've come to understand how to use it,
but they haven't come to learn how to maintain it, to guard the mind.
This is what an arahant has gained.
An arahant has gained perfect understanding.
They understand perfectly what is the right thing to do.
So they are able to maintain it naturally because it's become perfectly clear to them that this is the way to practice and that allowing defilements to arise only gives rise to suffering.
So as the Buddha warned us that once you gain this ability, once you understand how to practice, you have to constantly
Engage in it.
Try your best not to lose the practice.
Try to practice in your daily life.
This is why even when we're not practicing, we'll have people continue in meditation, walking, walking, or when you see, see, see, see, when you hear, hearing, to be mindful of everything, even when you're not practicing.
And when we go home, to be mindful as best as you can, being mindful in relationships or conversations or work or society, whatever activities you have during the day, to try to be mindful of them as well, to guard this and to be able to cultivate and to totally obliterate
the Mara, the evil that exists in our minds.
So the Buddha reminded us in this way, we have to work for complete non-clinging, which is anivaisana.
We have to learn to guard our minds until we become perfectly free from clinging.
And then our minds will be considered to be completely fortified, perfectly fortified.
And the wisdom that we have then will make us, render us free from all sorts of suffering.
So this was the teaching that the Buddha gave and you can consider that this is just a very good summary of exactly what we should do.
First we look at, we have to, our practice is to look at the reality, to see it impermanent, suffering, non-self, to give up the idea that it is something pleasant, something stable, something controllable.
and develop our minds, develop the only one thing that can lead to peace, happiness and suffering, which is the mind, the purified mind, the fortified mind, the developed and cultivated mind.
and then guard that state.
And once you have developed this ability to be mindful, this ability to recognize things, continue and develop it continuously and intensively until you too are free and become enlightened.
So this was the verse for today.
To see the body as a pot, to fortify the mind like a city, to fight with Mara, with evil, using the weapon of wisdom.
And then guard our victory.
Don't rest on your laurels, but guard the victory and fight on.
continuously, to not become complacent with what you have gained, so that you can become totally free, and you can defeat Mara completely, through the practice of Insight Meditation.
So, that's the teaching for today, that's on the Dhammapada, just one more short teaching for all of us to think about during our practice, and to give us a support in our practice, and allow us to
come further along the path to becoming free from suffering ourselves so thanks for tuning in thanks for listening and I wish you all all the best