Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Tonight we continue on with verses 87 to 89, which read as follows.
Oka ano kamagama wiweke yataduramang.
Tatrabiratimit cheya hitwakame akinchano.
Pariyodapeya ata nang titakle sehipandito.
So three verses.
The meaning of which is as follows.
giving up or abandoning black damas, vipahaya.
Sukhang bhavita pandito, a wise one cultivates white damas, cultivates the white.
.
Having gone from home to homelessness, one dwells in a solitude that is hard to enjoy, difficult to enjoy.
And then the next verse, one should wish for such, wish for great enjoyment or appreciation of such happiness, having having destroyed or cut off sensuality, as one who has nothing.
One should cleanse or purify oneself.
As a wise one, one should cleanse the mind, one's own mind, of all defilements.
One who has well cultivated one's own mind rightly in regards to the sambodhi anga, the anga, the factors relating to enlightenment.
ādāna pati nisage, having abandoned clinging, anupādāya ye rata, who dwells happy without clinging.
Khinasava, who has destroyed the taints or the stains of one's mind.
Chuttimanto, one who is brilliant.
Teloke parinibbhuta, such a one becomes completely calmed or tranquilized or extinguished in the world.
So quite a bit.
This is, again, as I said, a part of this famous set of verses, or well-known in Thailand anyway.
It's something that we chant quite often.
I haven't chanted it in a while, but it's still quite familiar.
And as it happens, there is no story to go with these verses.
The story that we have is 50 monks,
who came to see the Buddha from Kosala.
And the kingdom of Kosala, 50 monks came to see the Buddha.
And when they got there, the Buddha asked them and had them relate to him the things that went on or their goings on.
And then that was it.
He taught them this verse.
So this is just simply an example of teaching the Dhamma.
So now my job is to explain this Dhamma.
That's really the key here because this is one verse that has quite a bit of pith to it, quite a bit of meaning to it.
There's quite a bit in here, so let's try and break it into pieces and relate it to our practice.
Kanhang Dhamma, the black Dhammas.
So we have this black and white.
This is common, I guess you could say, imagery that the Buddha used.
Black refers to the bad, and white refers to the good.
I have a friend who, many years ago, asked me about this.
He said, so did the Buddha have a problem with black?
This friend of mine was dark-skinned, African heritage.
And so he asked me, he said, did the Buddha have a problem with black, with the color black?
I mean, why do meditators wear white?
And the idea is that white is about purity.
It has something to do with purity.
But it's quite a charged statement and a charged tradition.
Because in India, the idea of light skin was associated with higher caste.
It's actually unclear whether that was truly the case, but there is some sense of that.
Especially I think after the British colonized and controlled the country for so long, it seems they may have promoted the idea.
But, you know, I don't think, I mean, my response to him was that, well, I mean, it has nothing to do with skin color because white skin would look, no one has white skin and no one has black skin.
There's no such thing.
We all have various shades of, from pink to tan, I guess.
It's more to do with light and dark, lightness and darkness.
Anyway, it's just a word.
It's not that the Buddha liked the color white more than the color black, but there is suitable imagery that corresponds with it because white is associated with light, which you can use to see.
Black is associated with darkness, which implies the inability to see and corresponding problems and difficulties.
But here it refers to evil and good.
So one should give up evil and cultivate good.
destroy evil in one's heart and cultivate the good.
So we're talking about unwholesome bodily acts and acts of speech and unwholesome states of mind.
And then we're talking about their opposites when we refer to the white.
So wholesome deeds of action and speech and wholesome thoughts.
So the first two are in regards to morality.
The third one is in regards to concentration and wisdom.
But this is how it starts.
We start by
somehow monitoring our body and our speech, and watching our movements.
This is how meditation starts, right?
We start by looking at the body, and it may not be clear, but simply watching the stomach rising and falling is an example of morality.
It doesn't seem like it's an ethically charged thing to do, but it actually is.
It's an ethically sound action, which sounds kind of funny.
But it's an action, watching your stomach rise and fall is an action that is free from any unethical or violations of ethics from a Buddhist point of view.
When you walk, stepping right, stepping left, you have ethics and you're monitoring your actions.
And by doing that, I mean the extension is that when you're doing sitting or walking meditation in this way, you're less likely to commit an infraction or you're less likely to commit an act or a speech that is unwholesome, not simply because it's a ritualistic movement.
That's more to do with protecting you while you're training.
Also because you're mindful.
And the point is you're cultivating mindfulness so that then when you take that out into the ordinary world, you'll be able to apply it so that when a mosquito lands on your arm, you won't immediately react by killing, by attacking.
So from the very get-go that's what meditation is all about.
And then later on it begins to affect your mind, begins to change so that you don't even want to kill, want to hurt, want to
to do such things.
You're more inclined to do good things, to help people, as you see how it brings peace and happiness and how it's just a more efficient and productive thing to do, do good deeds.
So going from home to homelessness, this is obviously a big part of the Buddhist monastic path.
Now it's not for everyone, but here he is talking to monks, and it is considered a great thing to do.
You could also look at this sort of...
I guess symbolically, because it refers to... Oka is an interesting word.
You could think of it simply as going from owning things to not owning things, in the sense of not letting things own you, not identifying with your possessions, because obviously monks would live in
huts, and they nowadays live in even houses, or some monks live in apartment buildings and that kind of thing.
So it's not the case that they don't have a dwelling.
It's that they don't have anything that they call their own.
And lay people can do this as well, not in the sense of legally giving up the right to things, but
mentally and in terms of the ego, giving up one's attachment to things and using things, not having things own you in that sense.
And as a result of this, one attains a
solitude.
One's mind isn't constantly flitting off to one's belongings.
It's hard to find such solitude.
The Buddha said, hard to enjoy.
And he talks about, he uses this word often because most of us would like possessions, right?
And are obsessed with our possessions and getting more possessions and protecting and maintaining and even just looking at and touching and using our possessions.
It's hard to enjoy the solitude of giving things up.
Akinchino, which we see in verse number 88, being with nothing.
Akinchino means someone who has nothing.
It could be in regards to physical possessions, it could be in regards to mental attachments.
So he says, one should strive for, one should wish for.
It is worth wanting, in a sense, such...
A sense of enjoyment, enjoying being at peace.
Hito akami, having destroyed kama, having destroyed sensual pleasure, sensual desire, the attachment to sensual pleasure, the objects of sensual pleasure, having given them up.
and purifying one's mind of defilements.
This is what a wise one does.
You notice the pattern of the talk about a wise one, right?
This whole chapter is the Pandita Vagga, which with these three verses we've now finished.
But this is how the Dhammapada is set up.
Each chapter is associated by the mention of a certain specific word.
So there's I think 22 chapters, 20 some, more than 22 I think, 20 some chapters and 423 verses.
And we've just finished the sixth vaga, the sixth chapter, which is the Pandita chapter.
Anyway, so we're clear in our minds in this tradition, in the Buddha's tradition, that clinging to things is a problem.
And that if we can be free from such clinging, if we can come to just live without this clinging,
then we would be free from suffering, that this would be a better thing.
And so the Buddha in 88, he gives a description, it's just a very brief description of how we go about this, and this is by cleansing our minds of the attachment.
So the answer is not to always get what you want, it's to stop wanting.
To stop wanting for things.
Clear your mind of defilements.
Clear your mind of the things that make you want this and want that, or make you hate this or hate that.
And this is our practice in meditation.
So we're constantly working on this.
We're not concerned about what we get or don't get.
We look at our, we watch our minds, observe our minds, monitor our minds as we get and as we lose and as change comes to us again and again.
We work out these mental states, slowly changing and purifying our minds.
This is the practice.
This is the Buddha's exhortation to these 50 monks.
And then finally, 89 gives more details we have in regards to the Anga of the Sambodhi, the factors of enlightenment.
This could be the Bhojunga, or it could also be the Bodhipakya Dhamma.
Probably, I think the commentary says it's the seven Bhojungas.
So it means cultivating the Bhojungas, which, if you don't know what those are, we have Sati.
It starts with, of course, Sati, which is the ability to remember or remind yourself, the remembrance of things as they are, seeing things as they are, not as you wish them to be, or
how you like them to be, not based on liking or disliking, not judging them or extrapolating upon them.
And then with sati you have dhammovichaya, which means this investigation that goes on, or not investigation, but more like starting to categorize and separate and...
to figure out, to understand Dhammas, let's put it that way, to understand reality.
So as we meditate and we cultivate sati, we start to see the difference between right and wrong.
We start to see what we're doing wrong.
We start to change our habits naturally.
Our minds start to change as we see how we're causing ourselves suffering.
It's like, that's not useful.
If I continue that, it's going to cause me suffering.
Better that I change that.
It's not even intellectual, it's just naturally, through the observation, through monitoring and seeing what we're doing right and wrong, we're able to change.
So this is tamo vijaya.
And then there's uvidya, which is effort.
This helps us put out effort, and we also have to put out effort.
Putting out effort is important.
You have to work at it.
You have to constantly bring your mind back to the present moment, bring your mind back to reality again and again and again.
It's something that has to become habitual.
You have to cultivate the habit and you have to work at it.
So that's viriya.
Then piti.
Piti means you have to be... You have to have some kind of stimulation in a sense or...
You have to be into it.
You have to get into a groove and you have to work at getting into a routine and a groove and getting caught up so that it just becomes natural.
And pasati is tranquility.
Part of the practice is to calm the mind.
The mind becomes calmer as you sort things out in your mind.
And then samadhi is concentrated, the mind becomes focused and concentrated, seeing things clearly, not superficially, and not being distracted by everything that comes along.
And finally upeka, the mind eventually gets to a state where it
sees everything just as it is.
The judgments fade away, and the mind is simply noting experience after experience after experience.
So all seven of these are the seven bodhjungas that the Buddha is talking about.
And it's a really good, simple explanation of the various things that we have to cultivate in our practice.
And this is called sammājitam subhāvitam, the right cultivation, well-cultivated mind, well and rightly cultivated mind.
more or less one should give up clinging so it all comes back to our our clinging what we mean by judgments we mean our inability to adapt and to keep up with change basically you know things change something comes or something goes and
And we cling to what it was or what it is.
So it is right now and rather than roll with it and change, we want for it to change.
Either to get closer to it or to get farther away from it.
We want it to come or we want it to stay or we want it to go.
And that's called clinging.
And that's what we're giving up.
So the Buddha says we give this up and dwell happily without it.
kina asava, having destroyed the asava, the various taints, which relates back to the defilements that we already talked about.
So it's desire for sensuality, desire for becoming, wanting to be this, wanting to be that.
Thoughts that arise, hey, it would be great if I was boss or something like that, president or whatever.
And then views of self and so on.
All of these things that cloud our mind or cloud our judgment.
Jyutimanto, brilliant, because one is full of wisdom.
As one practices, one comes to understand oneself and by extension really the whole universe.
And that's a sort of brilliance.
such a person becomes free.
So as a result, it's not just a static state where, okay, now I understand reality, now what?
It's not static, because once you understand reality, you let it go.
And that's how cessation comes about, that's how the experience of nirvana or nibbana comes about.
And eventually that's how one frees oneself from the rounds of samsara, being born old, sick, and dying.
and that's what is meant by parinibhuta one frees oneself from the cycle that we find ourselves trapped in so that's all these are teachings for us to remember
It's like one of those quotables of the Buddha, something you could quote.
Although, as you can see by the translation, it's not easy to be literal and to quote this literally.
But there are some good translations of the Dhammapada out there.
So I'm just trying to get the sense across and give some interesting teachings.
So we have several in here.
And at the heart of it are the seven bojangas, which is now explained in brief.
So, that's the teaching on the Dhammapada today.
Thank you all for tuning in.
Wishing you all the best and keep practicing.