Welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse number 65, which reads as follows.
muhutampi je vinyu panditam payirupasati khipam dhammam vichanati jihvah suparasangyata
Which means very similar to the last one but here we're talking about the opposite.
If a wise person even for a moment should attend upon or hang out with a wise person
They are quick to understand the Dhamma.
Just as the tongue is quick to know the taste of the soup.
Just as the tongue to the soup.
A wise person is able to quickly understand the Dhamma of a wise person.
by hanging out with a wise person, even for a short time.
So this is again a rather short story, but we can provide a little bit of background.
This is in relation to the group of 30 friends who, the story goes, were out cavorting in the forest with their wives.
and one of them didn't have a wife, so they hired a courtesan for her, for him, an escort, I guess.
Contacted, looked in the Yellow Pages and found an escort service.
Something like the equivalent of the Yellow Pages, where you find an escort in those times, a courtesan, and invited her along to
to be his wife for the day.
So they went into the forest and they're playing in the water and they took off all their clothes, jump in the water and are sporting around.
And while they're in the water, I'm not making this up, either they were in the water or they were asleep, I can't remember which it was.
Anyway, while they were negligent, this courtesan runs off with all their jewels, goes picking through their clothes and gathers up all their valuables and runs off into the forest.
When they get back and find their clothes, missing all the jewels, they realize right away what happened and they start
They send their wives home, I guess.
It doesn't say about that.
But they go off into the forest, these 30 men, trying to find this courtesan and get back their jewels.
It just so happens that the Buddha, having taught the group of five ascetics in Isipatthana, having turned the wheel of Dhamma, and then having enlightened Yasa and all of his 54 friends,
and having sent the total of 60 Arahants off into the world to spread the teaching, no two of them going in one direction, so he sent them all throughout India, he went himself off to Rajgaha to spread the Dhamma there, to Uruwela.
There he would find Uruwela Kasapa and the other two Kasapa brothers and eventually go off and teach Bimbisara and spread his teaching in Rajgaha.
But first, he did something that appears in the
in the texts, he stopped off where these 30 men were running around the forest trying to find this courtesan.
And he stopped under a tree and just sat there in meditation and these 30 men wandered upon him.
And they looked and they said, oh, he looks like a wise person.
I bet he can give us some good advice.
And so they wandered up to him and paid respect, gave him respect and then asked him, venerable sir, you see, you look like you've been sitting here in the forest for a while and we wonder if you happen to have seen this woman.
We're looking for a woman who stole our jewels.
not exactly the sort of advice that most people would ask the Buddha for.
But the Buddha gives them something much more valuable.
He looks at them and he knows.
The reason he's there is because he knows the
ability or the qualities of these 30 men, they're highly cultivated individuals, even though they don't realize it.
And so he asks them, he says, what do you think is better, that you should search after a woman or that you should search after yourself?
Search after yourselves.
not exactly the advice they were looking for.
And of course this is the Buddha and so they take in what he's saying and they say of course it's much more important really even all the jewels that we lost are not really all that valuable in comparison to finding oneself.
Which actually sounds kind of non-Buddhist if you think about it.
Buddhism is all about giving up yourself, right?
Giving up the idea of self.
And so a lot is made of this passage, actually.
Those people who think that the Buddha actually taught that there is a self or had some idea of there being self.
But it's quite clear from the Buddha's teaching that that's not the case.
This is simply a teaching instrument.
how to get them to look for something that's truly valuable.
They probably were Hindus or whatever would have been.
They were of the Brahmin religion.
So they would have believed in a self.
So it's a good way to get people's attention to say, well, why don't you seek out what is truly important?
Seek out yourselves.
Come to know yourselves and learn about yourselves.
And he said, well, then sit down and I'll help you find yourself.
Had them sit down and he teaches them the Dhamma and they all became enlightened right there.
I don't know how many people have ever become enlightened listening to my Dhamma.
Probably not in the same category, I suppose.
But it can happen, you know.
Sometimes listening to a talk, if you're clearly aware of the
experience during the time that you're listening to the talk, it's useful because one, you can't go anywhere and two, the teaching constantly reminds you of good things.
Three, the company of the fellow audience members are all ideally on the same path.
And so there are good qualities to the
experience of listening to the Dhamma that you don't get elsewhere.
During that time it actually can be quite easy to realize the teachings, realize the truth of the Buddhist teachings, to find the truth, to understand reality.
And so they did, these 30 young men.
became Arahants and decided to become and obviously decided to become monks and proceeded along with the Buddha.
I'm not sure where they went actually.
Maybe they went off on their own somewhere.
But the other monks were talking about this later.
And this is how this verse came up.
They said, well, this is kind of crazy, you know, all of us would take so much work and maybe these monks weren't yet arahants, but they were, or maybe they were, but how long it took them to practice over the days and weeks and months and even years to become arahants.
But these 30 young men who were earlier in the same day frolicking in negligence, indolence,
And then suddenly they can become arahants.
How is that?
And the Buddha came in and asked them, what are you talking about?
And they said, I'm talking about this.
And then the Buddha said, well.
And then he actually told one of the jatikas based on this.
He said, the
He reminded them of Ajataka.
Once in a past life he had taught these 30 men were coming to kill him and he was able to help them realize the error of their ways and as a result they gave up their evil and became disciples of his.
But the meaning behind it is that
They had a lot coming into this.
We call it upanisaya.
They brought from their past lives.
We all bring this from our past lives.
We come into this life with qualities, both positive and negative.
The fact that we're born human means we definitely still are born with unwholesome qualities.
Everyone, even the bodhisattvas born as a human being, has to still have greed, still have anger, still have delusion.
Without those we wouldn't be born again as a human.
We have negative qualities, but we also carry all the positive qualities, all that we've cultivated in our past lives, all the good work that we've done in Buddhism and outside of Buddhism, helping other people.
being moral and ethical and high-minded and spiritually minded and being inclined towards the spiritual life inside Buddhism, within Buddhism and outside of it as well.
All the wisdom that we've gained, all the learning that we've gained from lifetime to lifetime, it doesn't leave us except insofar as our memories go.
Memories of course fade away as they always do over time, but
the quality of the mind changes, as we're all aware of as Buddhists.
And so the Buddha said it's because of the viññu, because these men are viññu, they're people who understand, people who have this resonance in them, the potential to resonate with the Dhamma.
Just as the tongue has the potential, a person without their tongue damaged, their sense of taste damaged, unless their sense of taste is damaged,
They have the potential to receive whatever the taste of the soup is, quite quickly, without any effort.
Unlike the spoon, which we talked about last week.
The spoon, no matter how long it touches the soup, it never tastes anything.
It's all about one's potential.
So the point is that the Dhamma is good in and of itself.
There's nothing wrong with the Dhamma just because we can't become enlightened off of it.
It's up to our qualities, as we talked about last week.
If we don't have those qualities, we spend all the time we want with enlightened beings.
And if our deeds and our speech and our thoughts are unwholesome and are not inclined towards enlightenment, then we'll never get there.
It's useless.
It's like being the spoon with the soup, but the quality of a wise person is
that they quickly understand the truth.
Even when they're just taught the Buddha's teachings from the books, they immediately get the meaning of it.
They very quickly get the meaning of it.
Some people when they hear the Buddha's teaching are confused and disinterested, turned off even, repelled by the Buddha's teaching when they hear about it being for the giving up, the discarding of sensual desire and the giving up of the whole world.
They think of this as a ridiculous, a horrible thing, a bad teaching, a teaching that is built on repression and so on and so on.
And the misunderstandings that arise come from a different sort of person, a different sort of personality.
There's people who are inclined towards the world, inclined towards craving and attachment.
They aren't able to understand the teaching.
And so it's a common question, how do these monks in the time of the Buddha hear the Buddha giving a talk and some people just immediately became Arahant, very quickly, like Sariputta.
Sariputta didn't even have to hear from the Buddha.
He heard from Asaji, one of the first five monks, one of the five ascetics.
And he just heard half of a stanza and he became a Sotapanna, just from hearing half of the stanza.
That's it.
You just turn that.
Whatever Dhammas arise based on a cause, the Tathagata has spoken of that cause.
That's it.
Became a Sotapanna.
He was ready for it.
That's the very sensitive tongue.
He quickly was able to realize the teaching.
What does this mean for all of us?
It means that realistically, first of all, we should never fault the teaching, just because it doesn't bring us anything.
If we can find fault with the teaching in an intellectual sense, this is when we should give up the teaching.
But when we find the teaching doesn't work, we have to ask ourselves one of two things.
Is the teaching ineffective, or are we unable to understand the teaching?
Are we unable to understand and put it into practice?
these two ways when you see enlightened beings and this is the key is if you your teacher is full of greed and full of anger and full of delusion maybe that's not maybe it's my teacher's fault or the teaching is impure but when you know that your teacher is like the Buddha we know that we have the Buddha and when we see that people who practice meditation are able to free themselves from these things
then we have to understand that it's most likely our own fault.
We ourselves are just lacking in the requisites to quickly understand the teaching.
Now, it's the first part.
The second part is not to be discouraged.
Not to be quickly discouraged because after a week of practicing I'm still not enlightened.
Here I have been sitting for ten minutes and I don't feel anything yet.
That kind of thing.
You have to understand that part of this is the cultivation.
Tōkang tōkang, the Buddha said.
Drop by drop or little by little.
Goodness doesn't come to you all at once.
It's something that you cultivate little by little, every moment.
Every moment that we're mindful, every moment that we're aware of something, that we're clearly aware of experience, just as it is without liking and disliking or judgment or attachment or conceit or views.
that moment is blessed, that moment is great.
If we can cultivate those moments again and again, continuously, eventually it becomes habitual and that's when we're able to understand the Dhamma.
For example, when you learn about Buddhism before you practice meditation, it's a lot less clear than after you actually sit down and practice the teaching and then approach the same text.
You find that you understand them so much better and so much clearer and so much more fruitfully.
And your studies are of far greater fruit because of your practice.
So it's not to be discouraged.
We shouldn't think that
We're useless.
We shouldn't think we're the spoon.
We should look at our own attitude as the point.
We shouldn't be like Udayi, this guy who just hung out with the Buddha and pretended to be wise but never really listened to what the Buddha had to say or put it into practice or tried to understand it even.
We should always try to put the teachings into practice, try to understand them more and try to apply them to our own life, not to just keep them up in our head or chant them or teach them to others or think about them.
We should actually try every day and in every aspect of our lives to incorporate them into our lives.
How can we be more generous?
How can we be more moral?
How can we be more focused and concentrated and clear in our minds?
cultivating goodness, the three types of goodness and cultivating morality and concentration and wisdom.
Most importantly using mindfulness to cultivate it all because mindfulness is what clears the mind and allows you to see the difference between wholesome and unwholesome and allows you to
Keep the mind from wandering in unwholesome ways.
Focus the mind and see things clearly.
That's what leads us to nibbāna, freedom from suffering.
The meaning is it's all on us.
It's up to us whether we're going to be the spoon or the tongue.
So the analogy ends there.
It doesn't mean that if you're a spoon you're always going to be a spoon.
It just means don't be a spoon, be a tongue.
Try to receive the teachings.
cultivate knowledge and understanding so you can understand the teachings.
And don't think that just because you've memorized all the Buddhist teachings or you know how to practice meditation that you're a Buddhist or that you're practicing the Buddhist teaching.
You should never take that for granted.
You find that the more you practice and the longer that you...
associate with Buddhism, with the Buddhist teaching, the deeper your understanding of the same teachings gets and you realize that there are still things that you're missing and it gets more and more refined and your sense of taste becomes more and more refined until you can taste the Dhamma, which has the taste of freedom.
So, simple verse, simple story, simple meaning.
We have to cultivate knowledge and understanding.
Understanding of the Buddha's teaching requires us to be ready for it or us to be in a condition to understand the truth.
So, that's the story for tonight.
The teaching on the Dhammapada.
Thank you for tuning in and for coming out.
All those who are here locally, I wish you all to find true peace, happiness and freedom from suffering.