Good evening and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse 101, which reads as follows.
sahasampice gatha anata-padasamhita ekam gatha padam seyo yamsutva upasamat
which means very much the same as what we, as the verse yesterday.
So yesterday it was about a thousand words.
Saha sampi je padang.
No, je waja, no, it's different.
Je waja, which I guess would mean words.
Interesting there.
Let's see here.
So yesterday it was about
words a little bit of a different almost the same verse but a little bit different anyway the idea is the first one was about word today it's talking about a gata which is a verse or a stanza gata is a whole like this is a gata that i've just said is a a stanza i guess or a verse whatever however you say it so the meaning is
if there should be a thousand words that are unconnected with or not connected again it's anattapadda so I may have been right anattapadda means the path of the useless path that are connected with the useless path or not connected with a useful path
So they don't lead you in a good direction.
They don't teach you something useful.
They maybe incline you in the wrong direction or direct your mind towards confusion or towards delusion, make you angry or upset.
Ekaṁ gātaḥ padam seyo.
One gāta is better.
One verse is better.
When one hears it, when hearing makes one tranquil.
So again, the whole idea is of the teaching not taking a lot of time.
I'm not going to talk too much about this verse because it's very similar to the last one.
That's okay because we've got a whole story here to talk about and there's another verse that we do want to talk about that occurs in the, another quote that we want to talk about that occurs in the story.
So the story goes that there were a bunch of merchants or some group of men who went sailing, probably to find their fortune.
And halfway through their trip out in the ocean, I guess, the ship sprung a leak and broke apart and everyone was drowned.
except for a man called Bahiya Daruchiriya.
And if any of you know the story of the elder Bahiya, that's what this story is about.
So Bahiya, being shipwrecked, wound up naked.
In order to swim to shore, he had to lose his clothes or his robes or whatever he was wearing.
and swim naked to shore.
And he wound up in a place called Supakara, Suparaka.
I don't know where that is, but some ocean port on the Indian subcontinent.
And
Being naked, he figured he had to do something to cover his private parts.
So he went and found a piece of bark or something sort of really simple to cover his private parts.
And then he picked up a piece of a broken pot and went into the city looking for alms, or went into the village looking for alms.
So out of an act of desperation he became a beggar.
And the funny thing was that when he got to the village people took one look at him in his sort of hard state of being, you know, maybe he'd been on the ship and he had let his hair grow and his beard grow so he looked like an ascetic.
And so they took one look at him wearing this bark, this piece of bark.
I guess there was like sort of a soft bark that you could actually turn into cloth.
So he had that wrapped around his private area and using this simple piece of garbage as a bowl.
They thought, wow, here's a real ascetic.
And so the rumor started, they saw him and so everyone gave him food and took care of him and the rumor started spreading that he was an Arahant.
And it was really because of the way he looked.
As time went on, people tried to give him good clothes, tried to give him things that would improve his state, and he refused them because he realized, you know, the only reason I'm getting such good food from these people is because they think I'm a holy man.
And so he totally played up this ruse
which speaks volumes to, or it acts as sort of a commentary on the state of religion in India in the time of the Buddha, and even the state of religion today, where there are so many charlatans or fake ascetics who really have no interest in the teaching, but put on the robes as...
a means of livelihood.
Or they put on airs pretending to be enlightened, pretending to be mindful, acting, saying things that are mysterious or enigmatic to try and garner support.
And so in the beginning it was just a ruse and he was playing it up, acting like an Arahant, dressing like what people thought of as an Arahant.
Of course in Buddhism there's no sense of this being what an Arahant looked like or anything.
But eventually people called him, people were so convinced that he was enlightened
that he himself became, started to believe it.
He started to feel like maybe he did have some spiritual attainments after all.
And so as time went on, he got right into the role and got a sense that, well, maybe I am, maybe I am an Arahant.
And he was so well taken care of by the people that he became a figure in this village or this society.
And he himself started to get stuck there.
And he would have been quite stuck.
If it weren't for, the commentary says, one of his blood relatives, and they use this word blood relative actually sort of with a double meaning, or not with a double meaning, but they don't really mean blood relative, but it has a different connotation.
What they mean by blood relative is actually not referring to his blood relative.
It's referring to a fellow religious person in a past life, a fellow monk.
So it happens that in the time of the Buddha Kasapa, there were a group of seven monks.
And this is actually a fairly well-known story of these monks.
This whole story is quite a well-known Buddhist story.
So if you're hearing it for the first time, remember it well.
You can tell it at Buddhist parties.
Tell it to all your Buddhist friends.
It's a good story.
So far, so good, no?
So now we have to go back to the past though.
Here we leave Bahia, where he's just starting to give rise to this thought, maybe I am an Arahant.
And we have to explain what happened next by going back to the past.
It happens that there were these seven monks in the time of the Buddha Kasapa.
It was actually after the time of the Buddha Kassapa, which is interesting.
It's a unique description of the corruption of religion, the corruption of Buddhism.
So there were seven monks who were noticing and really discouraged by the fact that everyone, all the monks, the novices, even the lay people were quite corrupt.
The whole society had become corrupt.
And so they said to themselves,
And the quote is, so long as our religion has not yet disappeared, we will make our own salvation sure.
So they paid respect to the Chaitiya, the big golden monument in honor of the Buddha.
and the Bodhi tree, and then went to the forest, to a mountain, and put this ladder up so they could climb up to this cliff, sort of this isolated cliff halfway up the cliff wall, just like a ledge.
And then they cut off or threw down the ladder, and they agreed amongst themselves that they would practice until death.
either death or enlightenment with supernatural powers that would allow them to escape their fate.
So like complete and utter dedication.
It's like do or die.
Literally do or die.
And so they practiced.
I guess the ledge was big enough for them all to do at least sitting meditation.
Maybe they didn't do walking meditation.
Don't know how big the ledge was.
but the seven monks meditating arduously, with ardor, arduously?
That's not the right word.
Ardently, that's the word.
And within a day,
They were totally dedicated, and you can imagine how that affected them and encouraged them in their practice.
Actually, it could be a useful sort of thing.
I mean, don't quote me on that.
Don't go off and try this at home.
It's one of those things you want to leave to the experts.
We have to remember these guys were monks, and maybe they didn't, probably they didn't actually have contact with the Buddha Kasapada.
This would have been after he had passed away.
So nonetheless, it's something interesting if someone were so inclined to... I can't believe I'm saying that.
Probably I shouldn't encourage it.
I mean, absolutely.
I mean, it's something that we would encourage in Buddhist countries, but out of the interests of not being sued, I think we will not encourage such activity ourselves.
Nonetheless, interesting that it happened.
An interesting concept.
And within a day, the eldest of them, the most senior of them, became an arahant.
And became an arahant with powers to levitate his body and fly down and get food.
And so he came back with food.
This part you don't have to believe.
This part is, you know, where we can decide whether we want to believe or not believe.
It's not important.
It's not an important part of the story.
So if it strikes you the wrong way or if it
makes you feel bad, or makes me lose credibility in your eyes, well, please consider this isn't the important part.
He came back with food for the other monks and said to them, please eat with me.
And you kind of get the sense he may have just been being kind, but there was something to what he said.
Because as an arahant, he could teach them, right?
Especially if they were to take food, then he could probably give them some instruction.
I'd imagine that was part of his thinking.
But the other monks took one look at him and said, excuse me, did we make this kind of deal that if you became enlightened, then we would start eating your food, like living off of your enlightenment?
And he said, no, we didn't make such a deal.
And they said, well, then if we become enlightened, we will go and get alms food on our own power.
And so sure enough, the second day, the second monk became an anagami.
Not an arahant, but an anagami.
An anagami is someone who has freed themselves from desire, sensual desire and aversion.
So they still have some desire, desire for becoming, wanting to be this, wanting to be that.
There's still the concept of conceit.
Not exactly self, but kind of a bit of an attachment to ideas.
But as a result, they are born in the purest of pure Brahma worlds.
They're called the pure abodes.
And they live there for billions of years.
until finally they become an Arahant there.
This realm is so pure that it can only lead to freedom.
It might take billions of years, but I don't know how long, I'm assuming it's billions, but lots and lots of years.
And he too gained magical powers, so he too went down, brought food back, and the two of them tried to convince the other five to eat, because by now, two days without food or water, they were really doing badly.
But the other five were adamant, and they refused the food.
And so for the next five days, they strove ardently.
And after the seventh day, they all died.
All seven of them, actually, I think.
And it actually doesn't talk about the other two.
You wouldn't think the other two would have died.
Maybe they died as well.
Let me see.
Yeah, no, actually, the two that became enlightened probably didn't die there.
There's no sense, it wouldn't make any sense that they did because they were able to leave at will.
But the other five withered up and died.
and were born in the heavens.
They were born in a good place because their minds were really set on good things, totally dedicated to goodness.
There's nothing wrong with such a thing, except insofar as people think it's suicide, but not really.
It's interesting because in India this was a big thing.
Starving yourself to death was considered to be a valid religious practice, not in Buddhism, but in other religions.
So these monks weren't exactly starving themselves, they were just putting themselves in a position where nothing would deter them.
Probably still not exactly an encouraged sort of practice, for the reason that you've only got about a week before you die, so it really is either do or die.
Anyway, it's an interesting story, quite well known and discussed.
But they were all born in heaven, and eventually became five of the Buddha Gautama's, five people in the time of the Buddha Gautama, I'm not sure, I can't remember about them all, but
Three of them, at least three of them became Arahants.
Anyway, one of the five was Bahia, Daruchiri, our guy.
So here he is, after all that, kind of getting the idea that maybe I am an arahant, and it probably is coming partially from his intense desire to be an arahant.
So he starts to think, hey, maybe this is it, maybe I found it.
Even after all these lifetimes, it was still deep in his psyche.
And at that moment, we are told,
this the number two elder who remember was born in the brahma realms in the suddha vasa the pure bones and this is like i guess lots and lots of years later but he's still up there kind of gets word of it or maybe he's been keeping tabs on his brethren throughout samsara and so just happens to
happens to get a sense of what's going on with Bahiya and looks down and starts shaking his head and I don't know if Brahmins have heads but he starts he realizes the need to go down and say something go down and fix things make things right
And he says, well, he is a friend of mine.
He is a relative, a brother in the Dhamma.
So I have an obligation.
I should go and do something.
So apparently, this Brahma, this god, basically, came down
Maybe he stirred up a storm or thunder and lightning bolts and says, Bahiya, you are not an arahant, nor are you on the path to become an arahant.
The practice that you have undertaken is not the practice that leads one to an arahant.
You don't have the qualities of an arahant.
You are not an arahant.
Period.
And Bhai is looking up at the great Brahma, a god, and telling him this.
And I think that would stir up just about anyone.
And so he realizes, you know, no, no, clearly I'm not an arahant.
This is correct.
It's a wake-up call.
If you don't like that version of the story, you can pretend the story goes that someone came up to him and woke him up and said, look, you don't look like an arahant, buddy.
You're not an arahant.
At any rate, he was stirred and he asks his friend, do you know where there is?
Okay, maybe I'm not an arhant, but do you know of anyone who is?
Someone I can go to?
Because it seems like a good thing to be.
Something worth inclining towards.
And here I am, everyone thinks I'm an arhant.
It would probably be a good idea to actually become one so I'm not a hypocrite or a charlatan.
And the deity tells him, in Savatthi, that's where you've got to go, to the north of here.
Ah, it's to the north.
So this port, what is it called?
Suparaka.
Suparaka is in the south.
And so he sends him on his way.
He says, to the north, there's a city called Savatthi.
That's where you have to go.
There's a Buddha.
And Bahiya dropped his belongings there and ran throughout the night and arrived at the city of Sabati.
Just as he arrived at the city of Sabati and went, asked around and
went up to some monks and asked where the Buddha was.
And they said, oh, he's just gone for alms into the city of Savatthi.
So Bahiya ran towards the city and got to the Buddha just as he was walking through the streets.
And
when he sees the teacher there in the streets, he bows down, prostrates himself at the Buddha's feet, and says, Venerable Sir, I am at your mercy.
Please teach me the Dhamma.
And he said, where are you from?
He said, I come from Suparaka.
And he said, oh, you've come a long way.
He said, sit down, rest a while.
I'm on alms round.
Once I finish alms round, then we can talk.
when i return just wait here and when i return i will teach you but bahia is having none of it he says no please now i don't know when i'm gonna die i don't know when you're gonna die i don't know what the future holds please i i mean i don't need anything big don't need a long teaching just give me a brief brief teaching it's fine
And his body is trembling and shaking.
He's just so excited.
And just having seen the Buddha, he said, I found finally.
It also probably has something to do with the fact that he had lived with the Buddha before.
But he is ecstatic about this.
And it says that for that reason the Buddha turned him away and the Buddha put him off.
So again the Buddha says, look, it's not the right time.
I'm going on alms.
Well, wait, wait.
And again Bahi says, please, please teach me.
And for a third time the Buddha puts him off.
And for a third time, Bahiya says, no, really, not to be put off.
He requests for a third time.
But the Buddha actually, at this point, the Buddha did this for a purpose, not actually intending to put him off, but to calm him down.
So by the third time, Bahiya had kind of focused his mind and calmed himself down, and he was ready to learn.
And so the Buddha did give him what amounts to really one of the best simple explanations of vipassana meditation.
And so this is the teaching that I think we can talk a little bit about rather than actually dealing with the Dhammapada verse tonight.
And he says, Well then, Bahia, this is how you should train yourself.
And then he says, The full verse and the full teaching is in the Udana, not in the Dhammapada.
So this is just a recalling of the events that led up to the teaching.
But the gist of it is, Let what is seen just be what is seen.
Let the seen just be seen.
Matta.
Matta means strictly or just, only, merely.
And so that really is the essence of Insight Meditation.
Just hearing this, sutta sutta matta bhavisati, and then he goes on to say, if you do this, there will be no self for you.
There will be no self in this.
There will be no self from this.
You will have no attachment to here or there or anywhere.
And just from that very basic teaching, Bahiya became an Arahant.
I'll come back to the teaching in a second, but we'll just finish our story here.
After becoming an Arahant, it turns out that Bahiya didn't have the good fortune.
He had never given any gifts of monastic requisites.
He'd never given robes, he'd never given a bowl.
And so there's an idea that this is somehow a prerequisite for actually being able to ordain.
It sounds kind of improper for me to say this as a monk, but it is.
And I think it bears telling, because it's the kind of thing that I personally think about.
For those people who become monks and are keen to stay as a monk, it's also a very useful thing to give robes to other monks and make that as a determination.
I'm always trying myself to give robes and give monastic requisites with the intention that it should allow me to always be, to remain in this state of being a monk.
It's a support for your own determination to stay as a monk.
So I think it's a useful thing to talk about.
Not that I'm saying, you know, hey, give things to monks because, you know, well, that's kind of crass, I suppose.
But nonetheless, that's what the commentary says and it seems reasonable because he wasn't able to ordain.
The Buddha said, he said, please ordain me.
And the Buddha didn't say, come monk, because Bahiya didn't have the good karma.
In fact,
If you want to guess what happened to Bahiya, it turns out he's one of the five that we talked about last night.
If you remember what we talked about last night, as he was searching for a bowl and robes to ordain with, he met our infamous cow, the cow that killed five.
a number of people in the Buddha's time, Bahiya being one of them, gored him on her horn.
But as I said, it was supposedly not a cow.
It was actually a demon in a cow form.
Anyway, he died.
And the Buddha on his way back from alms round saw Bahiya's body lying in a ditch or on the side of the road and told the monks to take his body and to erect a stupa.
And so they actually call him Bahiya Tera, which is interesting.
He's an elder, even though he never ordained.
He's one of the 80 great disciples of the Buddha.
He's considered to be the Buddha's chief disciple
in regards to development?
I thought it said here.
Probably does.
Preeminent among my disciples who are quick to learn the truth.
So he was the one who was able to learn the truth the quickest.
Go from zero to Arahant in the shortest amount of time.
The quickest.
He was remarkable in that respect because he got very little teaching.
Even Sariputta heard a little bit of teaching and only became a Sotapanna.
Gondanya, when he heard the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, became a Sotapanna.
Usually it would take a little bit more teaching than this, but with Bhaiya, there was a brief teaching in the middle of the road.
He was so dedicated that even with a short teaching, he was remarkable in that he was able to become enlightened just by hearing, ...
So the monks were surprised.
They said, well, how did he become an Arahant?
They said, well, when I just taught him this teaching.
And they said, just with that short teaching he became an Arahant?
And again the Buddha said, oh no, it's not about how much.
It's not about much or little.
And then he taught this verse, sahasampi je gatha.
You can teach someone a thousand gathas, a thousand verses, and if they're useless, no benefit.
But one verse, if it's associated with the verse, it's worth a thousand verses, a thousand useless verses.
So it's the quality, not the quantity.
That's the verse.
But what we have to learn has much more to do with the teaching that he gave to Bahiya.
Because we've already talked about this concept expressed in the Dhammapada verse.
The teaching of Dittay Dittamatang Bhavisati, just briefly, just to remark at how important that verse is, because it describes the essence of the practice of objectivity, that we're trying to see things just as they are.
It's incomprehensible to most people.
You think, well, that's ridiculous.
Seeing, of course, is just seeing.
That's all it is.
But that's only because if you've never practiced insight meditation, you've never actually explored, you've never actually really deeply come to understand how the mind works.
We don't connect our addictions, attachments, our aversions and fears and worries and so on with the actual moment-to-moment interactions of our mind and the manner in which our mind interacts with reality.
Once you have, it becomes clear that really that's the problem.
Dita is not just dita.
What is seen is not just what is seen.
When you see something, you immediately make more of it than it actually is.
It becomes good, bad, me, mine.
Scary.
a problem troublesome the goal becomes so many different things and we react accordingly liking disliking becoming obsessed with it attached to it clinging to it
So really the essence of our practice is to change that, to change that habit and in the process to see clearly that those things which we react to are not worth reacting to.
So becoming naturally objective
to the point where naturally we see things as they are because we have no reason to see them as good or bad.
Because we see that it doesn't help.
We see that treating something as good or bad only gets you caught up in problems.
This is really essential to overcoming addiction, to overcoming aversion, to overcoming depression and fear and anxiety.
It's not to chase it away, not to get upset about it, but just to see it as it is.
To see every experience as it is.
When someone says something to you that you might like or dislike,
it's not the hearing that's the problem if you just hear it there's no problem it's the judging judging it as more than just sound more than just words more than just speech and then even when you like or dislike it you judge the liking or disliking as meaningful you ascribe some extrinsic meaning to it you say oh this is I like this therefore I should chase after it I dislike it therefore I should tell that person to be quiet or go away
So the whole reason why we're practicing meditation is this.
The whole essence of what we're trying to accomplish with saying to ourselves, seeing, seeing, or hearing, hearing, is just this.
That it should just be what it is.
Now when you do this, it's going to be quite jarring in the beginning.
Why people are uncomfortable often practicing this meditation is because it's not comfortable.
It goes against our inclination to cling, to follow, to examine, to extrapolate.
to continue.
And so we've gotten into this rut of our habits and when you start to break that up and just say seeing, seeing, it can be quite disruptive in the beginning.
But quickly, you should be able to see the difference.
Once you get skilled at it, which doesn't take very long, you should be able to see one moment where your mind is clear, where seeing is just seeing.
And you can tell the difference between that and our
And the alternative of attaching, of clinging, of making more out of things than they are.
This state of objectivity is clear, is calm, is pure.
The mind is not sullied, is not attached, is not suffering.
The mind is at peace in that one moment.
So if you have pain and you see it just as pain, you no longer suffer from the pain just in that moment.
When you hear something, see something, feel something that is unpleasant, when you experience it, remind yourself, and then you just see it as it is, you can see that it actually wasn't a problem in the first place.
With practice, this becomes our inclination and eventually leads us to let go completely and not cling to anything.
And that is what leads us to true freedom.
So that's how that is useful to us.
And it's great.
This is a great example.
It's a great, sort of an epic, one of those epic stories that wouldn't become a movie in and of itself, I guess, but could be part of a movie about the Buddha.
And this sort of vignette or this look at Bahia.
That's a great story, especially the ending where this very profound and concise teaching of the Buddha reminds us that seeing should just be seeing, hearing should just be hearing, feeling should just be hearing, and thinking should be just thinking.
If you do that, there will be no identifying, there will be no clinging, and there will be no suffering.
so that's the Dhammapada verse for today and that's our teaching so thank you all for tuning in wish you all the best keep practicing