Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse number 129, which reads as follows.
sabbe tasanti dandasa sabbe bhayanti matyuno atta nang upamangkatva na haneya naghataye Which means,
all tremble for or at the rod, the stick
The weapon.
All shake when presented with a weapon.
When threatened with a weapon.
All fear from death.
All are afraid of death.
Comparing to oneself.
Making a comparison to oneself.
One should not strike nor kill
This is the first verse of the Danda Vanga.
Danda literally means stick, but it can also mean weapon.
In English, they used to translate it as the rod.
The rod is a term in English denoting a sort of symbolic weapon.
Just like Danda.
And so we have a couple of verses.
The next verse is going to be the same, almost the same as this one.
But this was told in regards to a fairly simple story, but interesting nonetheless.
The Buddha was in Jetavana.
And there was a group of monks in the time of the Buddha known as the group of six.
Chabagia.
Chab means six.
Vagia, those of the group.
Those are the group of six.
So they were known as the group of six.
And they were infamous.
We did every bad thing imaginable, every bad thing possible short of breaking the rules that would get them expelled.
They broke all the rules.
all the other rules.
Tried to find ways around rules, and so they're the subject of a lot of rules.
Now, it may be, and someone might argue that
They were just a scapegoat.
In the Vinaya, it seems kind of like they just didn't know who actually did the thing that caused the rule, so they just made up stories about the band of six, because they're really everywhere, and they did almost every, they did lots and lots of bad things, but, you know, they very well might have.
Long time ago.
It doesn't really matter.
It's not important.
What's important is
Well, what's important is they, in this story, there was another group called the group of 17.
I don't know, there were lots of numbered groups.
There was the group of seven, no, the group of, I can't remember.
Anyway, the group of 17.
So a group of 17 monks.
And they had prepared lodging for themselves.
And then the group of six came up to them and said, give us this lodging.
We're senior to you.
And the group of 17 said, what?
We just set this up.
We spent all this time preparing it.
We can't give it over.
We're not giving it over to you.
And so the group of six picked up sticks and started beating them.
They say it happened.
And the band of 17, afraid of death,
According to the English, they screamed at the top of their lungs.
I'm not sure that the Pali mirrors that.
having given rise to the fear of death.
Maha viravang, a great scream.
It says nothing about lungs.
Maha viravang viravingsu, they screamed a great scream.
Something like that.
And the Buddha heard this sound.
And he asked them, what was that?
And when the monks told them, he made a precept against hitting.
He said, monks henceforth, he doesn't say, but from this day on, from this point on, any monk who strikes another human being is guilty of an offence.
And so monks aren't allowed to hit.
Now there was later an exception where a monk can hit in self-defense.
Anyway.
Then he taught the morals of the story.
He said, you should never, how could you hit someone?
Do you not fear violence against yourself?
Do you not suffer when others hit you?
And this is an interesting teaching because pragmatically speaking, practically a utilitarian would say, well, yeah, but hitting me hurts me.
Hitting them doesn't hurt me, right?
It's different.
And so this idea, well, it's the golden rule, right?
What they call the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, which, you know, on the surface doesn't seem to make sense, right?
It seems like if you can get away with murder, why not, right?
That's what it seems like.
It's, I hurt you, I don't suffer from that.
And of course the standard Buddhist answer that everyone should come to everyone's mind is, of course you do, it affects your mind.
But it's curious that in fact there seems to be something about, something of how hurting others or doing unto others something that you don't want to happen to you.
That that aspect of karma actually has a power.
That when you engage in, whether you're the victim or the aggressor, when you engage in this activity of killing, it makes an implant in your mind.
It implants in your mind.
you become a part of that, you incline in that direction.
What I mean to say is, killing leads you to enter into the state of being killed.
I mean, there are some obvious ways in which this happens.
Like, how could it be that killing leads you to be killed?
Right?
If you kill, well, then you get accustomed to killing.
You don't get accustomed to being killed.
But you
You incline in that direction.
So the most obvious way is, well, if you go around killing people, you're probably going to make some people fairly angry.
You're going to make some enemies.
So on a practical level, absolutely killing inclines you more towards people seeking vengeance.
That's one way of, a gross way of understanding it.
But I think it's more subtle than that.
Another more subtle way than that is how killing affects your mind obviously and how killing, harming, unwholesome deeds, how they dull your mind and they twist your mind, they make you less careful, they make you more rash, you're more likely to do things that harm yourself because you're not careful, you're inflamed in the mind.
But when someone doesn't want to die, someone doesn't want to be hurt, and you hurt them, the power that has on your mind, I think you have to recognize the strength of the impact that that has on your mind, watching someone suffer, right?
You don't want to suffer, and you can feel it in them, this empathy, right?
And this compassion, this goodness, it gets drained away from you.
That's maybe one way of looking at it is we're full of goodness, but it's like a fuel tank and it gets drained, it gets sucked dry.
until you become psychopathic, right?
You become cold, you become cruel, you become accustomed to the suffering of others, but in general to suffering.
And that impression that that has changes you.
A person who kills for the first time, whether it be an animal or a human, it's very difficult.
But to continue killing gets subsequently easier.
And if you can find a way to hate a person, like through propaganda or just in the heat of passion, it's easier to kill.
The more evil you have in your mind, the easier it is to kill, obviously.
So the more evil a person you are, the more easy it is to kill.
And so killing has this effect on us.
It hardens you.
And that's quite scary for when it comes time when you have to give up the protection of this body and when you die and all that's left is the mind.
They say the mind is a terrible thing to taste, right?
It can be if your mind is in a bad way.
And so that's the third way is that when you do pass away, whether it affects you in this life, this life we're protected from karma to a great extent because we have this coarse physical body that inhibits the mind.
It inhibits the power of the mind.
The mind doesn't have much power when it's in the body.
When the body ceases, the mind is very quick, and if the mind is not well trained, it's not certain where it will go, except that it will follow its habits, it will follow its inclinations.
And if your mind is inflamed with the suffering of others, then that suffering will consume you when you die.
It seems, I think to many people, the idea of karma seems kind of artificial.
It seems like a belief that you impose upon the world without any evidence.
But I think, I don't think, but that is where meditation comes in.
And so I'm always trying to relate these verses back to our practice.
How this one relates, or this idea relates to our practice, through the practice is how you see this.
You see that it's not theoretical, it's not a belief.
If you've ever done bad things to others, if you've ever harmed others, if you've done a significant amount of evil, things that cause suffering, you feel it when you start to meditate.
It comes up and you didn't really think about it before.
You didn't think it would be a problem.
But when you meditate, you can't escape it.
Years later, you'll have these things come up.
Could have been when you were young, years ago.
The first thing people think about when they start to meditate, one of the big things during a course is meditators remember their parents, especially if they've been unkind to their parents.
And so you think, well, you know, respecting your parents, that's just a tool of religion to keep people in line.
It's really not.
Because I'm not making this up.
Meditators come and they will cry because of the love they have for their parents and the love their parents have for them and sort of betraying that love and being unkind to their parents.
any killing or harming they've done to others comes back.
Now, I mean, there's a fine line here.
You don't want people to feel, you don't want to dwell in the guilt.
The guilt doesn't really serve much purpose.
But it's important to understand
And the great thing about meditation is that it teaches you.
You don't have to believe in the negative consequences of killing.
You don't have to take on the precepts blindly.
It's good if you do take on them blindly because it'll protect you from what's actually truly problematic.
Like if you kill and you don't know it's bad, that's actually worse.
because you'll do it wholeheartedly and then when you finally if and when you finally figure out that it's wrong and you're able to do away with the ignorance it'll be that much worse because you think how could I have been so foolish once you finally wake up to the truth and that comes from meditation as you meditate you see things like this you think about you cringe you cringe thinking about the harm you've inflicted on others
A meditator will recoil at the thought of harming another being.
Naturally.
It's not something, oh, I'm a Buddhist, so I should feel bad about this.
It's nothing like that.
This is the claim, that morality is therefore intrinsic to nature, to human nature, to the nature of the mind of beings.
What we call morality is actually an aspect of reality.
It's intrinsic, it's like physics, the laws of gravity and so on.
There are laws of morality, ethics, goodness.
And some people object at the idea of good and evil, but they're just words.
Good leads to happiness.
Evil leads to suffering.
That's all they mean.
If you want to suffer, then do evil.
It's fine.
But there's another curious aspect of reality, and that's that we don't want to suffer.
Why that is, I don't know.
But we have certain things that inherently we shy away from.
Suffering.
And there's other things that we inherently strive for, the happiness.
And I think that's inherent in the universe as well.
It's not like you can, it's unsustainable to seek out suffering.
You can do it, you can force yourself, but the nature, the intrinsic nature of the mind is to seek out happiness and to try and find a way of freedom from suffering.
And that is where morality comes in, because morality is that which is coherent.
You want happiness, so you do things that make you happy.
Immorality is incoherent.
It's not incoherent, it's...
inconsistent.
You want to be happy and yet you do things that cause suffering, cause you suffering, that harm your mind.
That's immorality.
So it's a good quote.
This is a good sort of folky folk Buddhism quote of the Buddha.
It's also very powerful.
All tremble at the rod.
All fear death.
Having compared others to oneself.
One should not harm or kill.
So, that's the Dhammapada for this evening.
Thank you all for tuning in.
Wishing you all good practice.