Hi, and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Tonight we continue on with verse number 63, which reads as follows.
Yo bālo manyatti bālyam pandito vāpi tenaso bālo ca panditamāni sāve bālo ti ucyati
which translates as follows.
Yo bālo manyati bāyam The fool who knows that they are a fool.
Pandito vāpite na so For that reason, or to that extent, they can be called wise.
Bālo ca pandita māni bhat
the fool who thinks of themselves as wise that person indeed is called a fool so it's one of the more important Dhammapada verses I don't know, more memorable I suppose it's a powerful one especially for those of us beginning the path and feeling discouraged sometimes
Anyway, we'll go through the story and then we'll talk about the verse.
Story goes, it's a very short story actually, we're going to find several of the Dhammapada stories are quite short, so there's not much to say about them.
When the Buddha was dwelling in Savatthi, there were these two thieves who decided that they would go off to the monastery and try to rob the people who came to listen to the Buddha's teaching.
So here in Savatthi, it was a big city, walled city.
You can even still see the walls if you go now to visit.
That's all that's left is a big field with walls and ruins.
The ruins are just covered mounds of who knows what.
If you go up on these pagodas, you can see the walls all around the city.
So there would have been rich people and high class people who would go to see the Buddha
and hear the Buddha talk, hear the Buddha teach.
And because they would be so intent upon what the Buddha was saying, they'd often just lose track of their personal belongings, lose their care for their possessions.
actually be easy pickings this happens in Thailand actually or it has happened in Thailand so they say when you go to when you go to hear the monks talk don't don't don't keep your belongings close to you if you're going to meditate meditate with your purse in your hands or something like that because unfortunately
A byproduct of letting go is not worrying too much about your belongings.
So the best advice is to leave your valuables at home when you go to the monastery.
In large crowds, everyone sitting around meditating.
So they got there, these two thieves went and knew the Buddha was giving a talk and so they went and they saw the crowd and they split up.
to go and pickpocket the belongings of the audience.
But one of them, when he heard the Buddha speak, he stopped for a second, kind of looking and scoping out his target.
Then he stopped and listened to what the Buddha had to say.
And he became so enchanted by what the Buddha said that he just forgot all about stealing and he really listened to what the Buddha had to say and got the deeper meaning and realized there was a higher purpose to life and that theft of a few coins was meaningless in the whole grand scheme of things.
And so he sat down and he started meditating and based on the Buddha's teaching he was able to become a Sotapanna, just sitting there listening.
And so at the end of the night he just went back home without stealing anything.
The other guy went, found his target, stole some, I think it was five gold coins, pocketed them, went back home and had his wife cook him up some rich food and he'd gotten the dough.
gotten the spoils and so he had his wife prepare a meal with buying groceries or whatever and preparing a meal for him.
But the other guy went home and knowing he had no money and he had nothing to show for it, went home and ate nothing.
And then the thief who actually stole
found out about this, you know, they were bragging to each other, so he went up and asked him what he had gotten, and he said he didn't get anything, and he looked at him and he said, oh, he said, you know, what I got from this was wisdom.
And the first thief says, oh, really wise are you?
You're so wise you can't even feed your family.
Look at me, what I've got.
You call yourself wise?
Who's the one who's able to feed, who's able to put a meal on the table?
And the other ex-thief looked at his ex-friend and shook his head and thought to himself, look at this guy, this fool who thinks he's a wise man, not realizing how foolish he is.
And so he went to the Buddha.
He went back to Jetavana, where the Buddha was staying in the monastery, and related this to the Buddha and said, it's amazing how foolish people, what they think passes for wisdom.
And that's the story the Buddha then told us.
He said, that's very much the case.
The true fool thinks they're wise.
But a person, if they're able to know that they're foolish, to that extent you can call them wise.
This is an important verse because it highlights the importance of wisdom, the importance of truth, of understanding the truth.
True wisdom means understanding the truth.
It doesn't mean being able to lie and cheat and connive or plunder and so on.
There's a difference between worldly intelligence and wisdom.
And the key here that does have some interesting implications is that knowledge is always better.
Many people are shocked when they hear that in Buddhism we say it's better to know that what you're doing is wrong.
So we have this intuitive idea that if you commit a bad deed, we talked about this on Sunday at the MBBCA,
we have this intuitive notion that if someone performs an unwholesome deed, not knowing that it's unwholesome, that they're somehow less responsible, less culpable for their behavior.
Whereas a person who does something knowing it's wrong, we always say, you should know better, you know better than that.
So if the younger sibling
steals something, they say, he doesn't know any better.
And so they let him off for that.
But the older sibling who knows better, this is how it goes in courts as well, right?
The kid who's 12 to 18 doesn't know any better.
Under 18 doesn't know any better.
But once you're 18, you know better.
And so you're punished.
So we get this idea that somehow that would be the case for karma.
It would be less karmically potent to do something not knowing that it's wrong.
And that's really what this verse is talking about.
That if all you know is that you're a fool, that's better than not knowing you're a fool and going about doing things thinking you're wise.
This story aptly illustrates that point.
That the person who knows what they're doing is wrong, even if they're
engaging in it.
The idea is that they will engage in it hesitantly.
But a person who thinks they're wise in doing it will not only perform evil deeds, but will boast and brag about them.
An act of theft, whether you know it's wrong or not, is a corrupting act.
It's a violation of other people's property, other people's very being.
And if you can't see that, the intent to do it, the zest and the zeal in performing the act is much higher than if you can see that you're actually violating the person's being.
If you know that what you're doing is reprehensible, there's that force against you, the internal force acting against you.
Now, the opposite holds for doing good deeds, which is an interesting truth, that if a person performs good deeds, they're more powerful when you know that they're good deeds.
Obviously, if you know something that is good for you, is beneficial,
You're more inclined to perform it.
You have more confidence in performing it.
You're more content and interested and zealous about it.
Whereas if you don't know that something's good, your parents drag you off to the monastery to listen to the Buddhist teaching, or drag you off to give offerings to monks, to give food to the monks, or so on.
Or if someone's nagging you to give charity, or you're keeping the precepts out of
keeping religious precepts out of some kind of traditional compulsion or so on.
This is substandard to actually meaning it, actually performing it from the heart.
And so the point in both cases is knowledge is of greatest importance.
So it's a catchphrase that you can use for people.
And if someone boasts about bad deeds, you say, well, I may not be perfect, but at least I know my fault.
This is really one of the most dangerous flaws that there is, along with wrong view or belief in wrong view.
It is a form of wrong view.
If you believe that what you're doing is, if you believe that bad deeds are a good thing and that you're somehow wise in your foolishness,
That's more dangerous than the deeds themselves because that's what's going to compel you to perform the deeds with enthusiasm and perpetually.
So what does it mean to be a fool?
A fool is someone who acts, speaks and thinks unwholesomely.
So they perform unwholesome deeds with the body, they kill, they steal, they cheat,
They perform unwholesome deeds with speech, they lie, they gossip, they scold and they prattle or chatter.
And they perform unwholesome deeds with mind.
It means their minds are full of greed and anger and delusion, ill will and conceit and so on.
So we all have these tendencies, right?
We may not all kill and steal and lie and so on, but we all have the anger, the greed and the delusion.
until you become an arahant, these things exist in the mind.
That's not the worst, that's not the most important or the most horrific fact of, the most horrific evil that there is.
Worse than actually, it's not the real problem, it's not the most compelling problem.
The most compelling problem is our knowledge.
of what these are doing to ourselves.
A person who is angry, perpetually angry, if they know that they're angry, there's a potential to work it out.
If they know that it's a bad thing to be angry,
If a person is self-righteously angry, these are the people you have to watch out for, or the people who feel that there's benefit to being angry.
People who think that there's benefit to killing, there's benefit to stealing, and so on.
This is the problem.
A person who steals knowing it's wrong and feeling guilty about it, but steals a loaf of bread to feed their family, for example.
This is an unwholesome act, but nothing compared to
Nothing compared to stealing, thinking, not realizing there's anything wrong with it.
Stealing thinks it's a good thing.
Stealing from poor people, for example.
So how does this relate to our meditation?
It relates directly to insight meditation, because insight meditation is what allows you to see this.
The first step in insight meditation is not removing of greed, anger and delusion.
It focuses on one aspect of delusion and that's the wrong view aspect.
The first step towards becoming wise is realizing that you're a fool.
That's really it.
This verse is very important for us at the beginning because this is our first goal, our first step.
Our first step is to see what we're doing wrong.
To realize that we're not doing the right things.
that what we're doing is leading us to suffer.
In fact, deep down, that's really the final step as well.
In the beginning, it's intellectual realization that killing is wrong, stealing is wrong.
Eventually, it's just realization that all greed, all anger, and all delusion is causing us suffering, is harmful to our mind.
So this constant and systematic observation, introspection, and analysis that comes from just reminding ourselves and staying objective about our experience.
This allows us to see what we're doing wrong and allows us to change our behavior.
So in the beginning to know that we're foolish
and then to do something about it.
In fact, it really is, deep down, it's the only step that needs to be accomplished.
Every moment that you see that you're doing something foolish, that what you're doing is truly foolish at that moment, when you see that this reaction of yours to things, when you react, when you overreact, simple real-life examples, when you get anxious, if I get anxious that I have to talk in front of you, so I'm giving this talk and I feel anxious, when I see how ridiculous that is,
how it's not helpful, it's not reasonable, it's not a proper response, I say that's really a silly thing to do, it's foolish.
Seeing that, that wisdom, that is what changes my behavior.
Next time I have no reason to act in that way.
No reason to set my mind in that direction.
When you truly realize that it's wrong, your mind doesn't go in that direction.
This is the key to Buddhism, key to the Buddha's teaching.
This truth that knowledge is really true knowledge, true wisdom, true understanding of the mistakes that we're making.
Knowledge of the
the problem with our reactions.
This is the way out of suffering.
This knowledge.
Knowledge of suffering.
Knowledge that what we're doing is causing us suffering.
So, very important verse.
Maybe even more important than it appears, but it's a very catchy one and it's one that we should always think of and you can flaunt it to people who
who would say such things as, when you're goody two-shoes and, you know,
who brag and boast about their evil, their bad deeds, their unwholesomeness, their treachery, their trickery and so on.
They shouldn't boast, but it's a reminder for people.
It's a good thing to remind our friends, to remind ourselves.
We don't have to be perfect, not at the beginning.
The path to perfection is to realize your imperfections.
The path to become wise is to realize your foolishness.
That's it.
That's the path.
So, very important, and I think I've about beaten that horse dead.
So, there's the verse for tonight.
Thank you all for listening, and now we'll do some meditation.
Wishing you all peace, happiness, and freedom from suffering.
Have a good day.