Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse number 111, which reads as follows, Yo cha wasa satang jiwe, dukpan yo asamahito, ekahang jivitang seyo, panyuantasa jaino, which
means if one should live 100 years without wisdom, of little understanding, and unfocused, unconcentrated,
Better is a life of one day for one who is wise and meditates.
very similar to our last verse.
As I said, we're going to have a series of these, and so we'll probably go through them quite quickly.
The story for this one also is quite short.
So here we have a story about Kondanya, but it's a monk named Kondanya, not Mahakondanya, the Kondanya that many Buddhists are familiar with.
This one is Karnu Kondanya, Karnu.
And Karnu means stump.
So he was Kondanya of the stump.
He was an Arahant and he was dwelling in the forest and he lived alone for much of the time and he became an Arahant while he was in the forest and he was on his way back to talk to the Buddha to let the Buddha know that he had become an Arahant
And on his way back, he became tired.
And so he stopped and sat down on a rock and entered into a meditative state.
Maybe he entered into nibbana, maybe just ajana.
Probably entered into cessation, a state of attainment of nibbana.
We call palasamapati.
When someone who has become a sotapana, sakadagami, anagami or narahant, they can enter into a state of reviewing nibbana, going over the path that they have attained.
Not the path, going over the fruition that they have attained.
And so they enter into cessation for 10 minutes, 1 hour, 10 hours, 24 hours.
And during that time, it's complete cessation.
So they are completely oblivious to the world around them.
completely oblivious.
There is no seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling or thinking.
No even sense of time passing.
It seems as though that time is just missing, except there's a huge sense of peace that it lasts even after the person comes out of the state.
And so during that time, he would have gone in for maybe a day, 24 hours or something,
And during that time, a group of bandits, a large group of bandits, similar to in our last story, but these guys had plundered a whole village.
They had destroyed and robbed an entire village and gone in with their guns.
They didn't have guns with their bows and arrows and their swords and killed and raped and pillaged and
or maybe just robbed, because they don't seem to have been all that evil.
So they came up, and it was getting dark, and so they wanted to rest as well, and seeing this flat rock that the elder had sat on, they saw this rock, and they saw the elder, but it was getting dark, and so they thought he was a tree stump.
And so the head bandit took his sack with all his valuables that he had robbed and actually placed it on the elder's head and just plopped it down on top of him, maybe on his shoulders or something, just over top of him.
And the other robbers piled up their sacks around the original one, around the stump, sort of covering the monk completely, burying him in their sacks.
So there were five hundred bandits, or a large number.
probably usually you think 500 might be a bit of an exaggeration for one band of bandits, but a lot is the idea.
And, um, and then they slept.
and spent the night and the elder spent the night completely oblivious as to what was going on in the morning they wake up light out and they start to take the sacks off one by one and the chief picks up his sack or as they get close they see it's not a stump and he pulls his sack off and it's a monk sitting in meditation completely unmoved you know stiff and unaffected
and they were spooked and they thought it was some kind of evil spirit and so they started to run away and at that moment the elder came out of the attainment and so he turned and looked at them and he said oh don't be afraid I'm a monk I'm not here to curse you and they were shocked and moved reasonably so
seeing obviously an incredibly powerful meditator who spent the whole night covered in sacks full of heavy valuables.
Again, it speaks to this, the power of the attainment.
There's this idea of the power of true meditative attainment makes one invincible.
You know, I mentioned there's Tibetan monks who supposedly go into trances
And then they go and sit in snow banks and go into trances and maybe the fire element and they actually melt all the snow around them.
And they have contests to see who can melt the most snow.
I don't know, this is what I've heard.
But there's lots of fun things that supposedly happen.
And if you want to test, you can meditate for yourself and see what sort of things.
A lot of people experience what we call astral travel.
Some people are able to see things far away, hear things far away.
Some people are able to remember past lives.
Some people can see into the future.
Very strange things can happen when you meditate.
Of course, it's not the goal.
It's not why we meditate.
Anyway, here we have this idea of being somehow invincible when you enter into these states, physically invincible.
covered in heavy, heavy things and not being disturbed.
And so they were suitably impressed and made up their minds to become monks.
The head bandit said, I'm going to become a monk under that.
I'm going to become a follower of this guy because he's got the power.
Here we thought we were powerful.
we have this power over people making them afraid and being able to take their belongings from them but that's not real power not compared to this guy clearly he has far more power than us and so they became monks and so he made monks of them all just as Sankiccha had done and he went with them to the teacher
And when they got to the Buddha, the Buddha noticed and said, Oh, Kondanya, you've got some students with you, have you?
And Kondanya told them what had happened.
And the Buddha looked at the monks and he said, Is this truly what happened?
And the guys were like, Well, yeah.
Is it true you're a bunch of bandits?
Well, yeah, you know.
And the Buddha shook his head and said, better for you to live one moment, better for you to live but a single day, meditating, being engaged in things that are truly to your benefit, that truly bring happiness to you and to your mind, that truly bring good things.
better to live one day like that than to live a hundred years evil and committing such foolishness as you've been engaged in and so he
made a connection, made the connection to the Dhamma.
These stories at the end, it always says he connected it with the Dhamma.
Whatever the situation was, he points out the Dhamma in regards to the situation.
And as a result, having made the connection, he spoke this verse, and so on.
So a short story this time and a verse very similar to our last one.
There's not that much to say.
The difference here is whereas the last one was... Last one was in regards to morality.
dusilo this one is in regards to wisdom in fact it's interesting because the three things go together these two verses point out both sides of it so concentration is is the defining factor here but you have wisdom on the one hand and morality on the other and these three make up the three trainings of the Buddha together they
they describe the Buddha's teaching, they describe the Eightfold Noble Path.
So they are the path of practice.
One way of explaining it is you start with morality and you become focused as a result of being ethical.
Your mind becomes focused because you cease engaging in things that distract your mind or disturb the mind.
And once your mind is focused, in focus, then you can see clearly.
And that's wisdom.
So these three go together.
So it's rhetoric.
You don't have to pick either or.
The Buddha isn't saying either you can do concentration in wisdom or you can do concentration in morality.
He's just talking about good things and he's addressing a group of people who
who could best appreciate certain aspects of the teaching.
So for some people, ethics is more important, more interesting and more applicable.
For some people, wisdom will be more applicable.
So these verses are tuned to their audience, usually.
And probably in this case, after he desana vasani, at the end of his teaching, all 500 of the bhikkhus became arahants.
Isn't that awesome?
It would be nice if that sort of thing happened these days after teaching about the Dhamma, we all became arahants.
But you can't blame the Dhamma, you have to blame yourself, that our minds are so clouded that it takes much more than just a simple teaching.
But there's something to this idea that simple teachings can lead to enlightenment, because
the truth is not hard to understand.
It's actually quite easy and once you've understood it, it's almost as though you don't know how you can miss it.
For the most part we are clear about
reality.
It's just we add on so much more.
Or we ignore certain things.
Like, for example, talking about free will and determinism, if it's about free will, then we add a soul into the equation.
If we believe in determinism, then we ignore the mind.
We ignore the choice.
We ignore the first-person nature of reality.
We think of it as just physical.
When we are addicted to something, we tend to know that the addiction is causing us suffering, and yet we don't stop.
We're like insane people.
when we're angry when we're angry at someone we you make me so angry as though when someone makes us angry you make me so angry as though we're blaming them for our own suffering because we're suffering when we're angry we suffer blame
And so the teaching is actually quite simple.
If you receive these simple teachings and you become in tune with them, if you're hearing it from the Buddha, it's strong enough to jar you out of your state and really bring you in line with this truth.
It's so forceful and so confidently delivered by someone who is so pure and so perfect that it really changes you.
There's somehow kind of a magic in teaching in that way.
when you're taught and when it's delivered with confidence, the confidence of the Buddha, the power of the Buddha.
So there's that.
We're to blame for not being born in the time of the Buddha, and having actually listened to him, and instead you have to listen to me.
But the Dhamma remains the same and the path is still there.
It just might be more difficult of a climb, more difficult of a path.
If we don't walk it, then we can be sure to fail.
If we practice, we can't be sure if and when we'll succeed.
But if we don't practice, we can be sure that we will fail.
So there's that.
Anyway, that's the Dhammapada teaching for tonight, that we should be wise and meditate.
We practice these two things together, not just meditating, not just focusing our minds, but also cultivating wisdom.
Again, not just being concerned with wisdom without meditating and thinking that we know everything, studying and thinking and so on.
But actually coming to see for ourselves.
And when we meditate, this is what we see.
This is what happens.
We see impermanence, we see suffering, we see non-self.
We see through our delusions of stability, satisfaction and control.
or self and we've come to see that things are not the way we think they're not worth clinging to they have nothing no characteristic of them that is that makes them worth clinging to we start to see things as being without value without merit not not a stable we see that our own mind and everything in the world around us it's not a stable
a dependable refuge or platform on which to base our goals and our aspirations and our desires.
And so we give them up.
We give up our desire for such things.
And that's the best way to live.
If you live your life one day like that, it's far more valuable.
It's on a whole other league
from living and living well you know people talk about living and living the good life carpe diem seize the day eat drink and be merry like angels in heaven who enjoy their pleasant things up in heaven and they think well that's that's what it's all about right people will say this is what it's all about i mean i know i used to be there we'd party and
and dance and sing.
I remember going to dances when I was younger and everyone was so excited and so much, because there's so much chemicals in the brain, adrenaline and so on, and dopamine, I don't know what kinds of chemicals, involved with dancing and enjoying yourself and partying and drinking and laughing and joking and playing music, playing musical instruments and so on.
And then it doesn't make you happier.
You don't actually feel happier afterwards.
So that kind of life is actually pointless.
In the end you finish and you die and that was it.
You've gained nothing.
In fact, most likely you've cultivated all sorts of addiction and attachment and aversion that's going to cause you problems in this life and in the next.
So there's that.
Better to be mindful.
Better to be wise.
Better to be focused.
Better to see things as they are.
So that's the Dhammapada for today.
Thank you all for tuning in.
Have a good night.