Okay, so today we continue our study of the Dhammapada with verse number 16, which reads as follows.
iddhamodati pecamodati katapunyo ubhayatamodati somodati sopamodati disvakama visuddhimattano
which means here he rejoices, hereafter he rejoices.
The katapunyo, the person, the doer of good deeds rejoices in both places.
He rejoices, he thoroughly rejoices having seen the purity of his own actions.
This is the companion verse to our last verse 15.
But the story is different.
The story here is about a good doer.
It's a story of Damika Ubasaka.
Damika means one who lives by the Dhamma.
Ubasaka is a person who follows the teaching or who takes refuge.
And Dhammika Upasaka was a follower of the Buddha who was very much involved with the Buddha's teaching.
He was very keen on it and interested in it.
And so he would always go to listen to the Buddha's teaching, listen to the sermons again and again, invite monks to his house to give preachings.
And he would be always giving alms to the monks, giving food to the monks when they came.
And he was very much looking after them.
So always doing good deeds.
He was established in morality.
And I believe he was also a meditator.
He must have very well been because
He was very much interested in the Buddhist teaching on Satipatthana, as the story goes.
So as I understand, he may have even been a Sotapanna, but I'm not sure about that.
I can't quite remember.
Anyway, we can consider him to be a very good Buddhist in all senses of the word.
And so it happened that he as well, after many years, he became ill and was on his deathbed, just like Chunda, the pork butcher.
But when he was on his deathbed, rather than becoming deranged or having his deeds, his bad past deeds overwhelm him, his good deeds came to him.
And right away he thought to do more good deeds.
So when he knew that he was probably at his last moments,
he sent a message to the Buddha asking for monks to come.
Please send some monks, I would like to hear the Dhamma.
I figure the best way to go out is listening to the Dhamma and practicing according to the teaching.
So the Buddha right away sent monks and they came and they sat around his bed and they asked him, Upasaka, what teaching would you like to hear?
And he said, please recite for me the Satipatthana Sutta because it's the teaching of all the Buddhas.
So it's clear that he was very much interested in the meditation practice.
The Satipatthana Sutta is what our meditation practice is based on.
It talks about the four foundations of mindfulness, the body, the feelings, the mind, and the dhamma.
So if you haven't read it, I think you probably all have read it, but if you haven't read it, just to explain, it talks about
The body, so how when you're walking, you know you're walking.
When the breath comes in, you know the breath is coming in.
For instance, rising and falling.
Being aware of the physical aspects of the body, the movements of the body.
When the stomach moves, or when the foot moves, or when the hand moves.
Even when you're going to the washroom, when you're eating.
Whatever you're doing during the day, it talks about being mindful of the body, knowing it for what it is.
When you have feelings, you know the feelings for what it is, pain or aching or soreness.
When you have thoughts,
And when you have emotions, the dhamma, the liking, disliking, and so on.
This is what it talks about.
So they began to recite this.
They started with the beginning that says, This is the only way, O monks, or this is the one way, O monks, for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow, lamentation, despair, for the destruction of bodily and mental suffering, for attaining the right path, and for realizing freedom.
And so it's a very profound discourse.
It's one that even today they will often recite for people who are dying or recite just in general in meditation centers to remind them of the teachings.
So at this time he would be listening to it and he would also be practicing.
Now as he was on his way out, and because he was actually such a pure and wonderful person,
the story goes, and this is where many people get turned off, because some of these stories are a little bit fantastical.
So whether they're true or not, I'll leave it up to you to decide, with the point that the truth of the fantastical parts doesn't really affect the message at all, and it's our meditation that verifies or denies the message, which in this case is that a good person has good things happen to them.
But it said that he suddenly had visions of angels coming from all of the six levels of the sensual heaven.
And they came in chariots.
And they all began to call to him, please be born in my realm.
Because they all wanted this guy.
It was kind of like a baseball draft or something.
They all wanted this guy on their team.
And so they were all extolling the virtues of their heaven and that he should be born there.
And nobody else could hear or see them.
It was only a vision that he had.
And so he said to them, wait, wait.
And his children heard this, wait, wait, and this kind of distracted look like he was talking to himself, but that he was saying, wait, wait.
And they thought, he must be telling the monks to stop.
The monks were there chanting, and suddenly he interrupts them and says, wait, wait.
And so the monks suddenly stopped chanting.
And they listened to him.
Okay, he wants us to wait, let's wait.
because they respected this guy.
And the children started crying, and they were mortified, because they had been taught by him the importance of listening to the Dhamma.
And so they thought, well, he must be totally deranged, or he must be experiencing something terrible, and be afraid, and so on.
But he doesn't want the monks to teach the Dhamma.
And so they began crying.
They said, truly, no one is immune to this.
even our own father, who we thought was so mindful.
And so the monks saw them crying and the old man saying, wait, wait.
And they said nothing for us to do, so they all left.
And after they left, the old man said, where did the monks go?
Why did they stop chanting?
And he said, you told them to wait.
And we were all horrified that we realized that you also were becoming a little bit deranged here.
And he said, that's not why.
I wasn't telling the monks to wait.
I was telling these angels here to wait.
Don't come for me yet.
I'm still listening to the Dhamma.
And they said, what chariots?
We don't see them.
And then the story goes that he had them take a wreath of flowers and throw it up in the air.
And it landed on one of the chariots and it just hung there in the air.
And he said, that's the heaven that I'm going to be born in, the Tusita heaven.
And then he passed away.
And when he passed away, he entered into the chariot and went to heaven.
This is how the story goes.
So you can imagine that it may have been fancified.
It may not have been.
It may be true that this kind of thing happens.
I'm open-minded about it.
But it's not really important.
What we can understand, based on the last one, is on two levels.
A person who does good deeds has good things happen to them, and a person who does bad things suffers.
Sochati and modati.
Sochati means sorrows and modati means rejoices or feels great pleasure for.
And when the monks went back to the monastery, they said to the Buddha, they said, you know, we tried, but the sad thing is, you know, he got deranged at the last moment, and he actually told us to stop teaching the Dhamma.
And the Buddha said, that's not why he... And the Buddha explained to them exactly what happened.
And then they said, wow, I mean, he was so happy here on earth.
It's amazing.
He was so happy here on earth, and now he's...
even happier up in heaven.
How wonderful.
And the Buddha said, this is the way it goes.
A person who does good deeds, and he recited the verse.
So this is another thing.
It's also something that is often invisible to us because we take it in a very shallow sense.
So you'll often see people who have bad lives, who have bad things happening to them because of the nature of their lives.
And they will undertake to do good deeds thinking that it's going to get rid of all of their suffering, right?
And then they're disappointed that it doesn't and they feel like they've been betrayed and so on.
Because they have this incredibly shallow understanding of how good deeds work.
But you do have those people who understand how good deeds work and who really feel the benefit of them and understand how wonderful it is to, for instance, give a gift.
I have this story of a woman I knew when a girl, no, we were teenagers, and we were walking down the street in the middle of winter and suddenly she, we were walking side by side, suddenly she turned and
and went into a McDonald's, and she said, wait here.
And so I'm waiting outside, and there's this beggar right in front of me, this guy living on a piece of cardboard outside a McDonald's.
She comes out with a hamburger, and I know she doesn't eat meat, and she bends down and hands it to this guy sitting on the cardboard and says, here you go.
And I'm standing there kind of feeling ashamed of myself.
I didn't even see the guy until she went in.
I didn't think anything of it.
But right away, and then we started walking again, and right away she said to me, she said, I don't give to people, I don't give charity because I want them to feel happy.
I do it because I'm selfish.
I give gifts because it makes me feel happy.
This is a person who isn't religious at all, and I don't know where she is now, but she's just a person who has really felt the goodness of giving, the goodness of charity.
And I think people who are engaged in giving do feel this, because it's a pleasure that is unadulterated.
It's a pleasure that when you have this pleasure, there's nothing tainting it or contaminating it.
And it's also something that lasts with you forever.
It's something that's never going to be taken away.
Whereas pleasure based on sensuality is totally dependent on the object of the sense.
When a person remembers about the good deeds that they have done, they can repeatedly gain this happiness and this peace.
So it's something that people, I think, misunderstand, and it's a part of how people misunderstand karma as being some magical thing that you can just put money in a box and magically become rich or so on, or give this or give gifts and suddenly you are happy.
But people who do it continuously and who engage in it as a practice
giving or morality.
Morality is another one.
People feel like morality is a waste of time or it's just a lot of suffering to not do the things that you want to do.
You have a mosquito, why not just kill it?
The people who do it, and most importantly people who engage in meditation, are able to see the difference.
And so this is what you should all be seeing right now, that the good and the bad things in your mind have really very much contributed to how you now
relate to the present moment, how you react to things.
And through the meditation you begin to see the importance of doing good deeds, the importance of being generous, the importance of being moral, and the importance of developing your mind, of strengthening your mind, so that you can see things as they are.
As you can see, the weaknesses in our mind, the greed, the anger, the delusion, are what's causing us great suffering.
Our stinginess, our jealousy, and so on.
So it's actually easier to see how this works in the present life, even though most people don't see it.
But through a little bit of meditation you can see how it happens.
Now we have to kind of...
People say take a leap of faith to think about how it's going to happen in the next life, just like with the last one.
Is it really true that this man went to heaven and that man went to hell and so on?
But it's ameliorated and it's actually really done away with, this idea of taking a leap of faith in regards to what happens when we die, by understanding
by really appreciating the experience that we're having in meditation and internalizing it and realizing that this is reality.
When we look around us and we see there's this building, there's the trees and so on, we see other people, we're actually just building these constructs up in our mind.
The truth is that there's experience.
Now you're hearing, now you're seeing, now you're smelling, now you're tasting.
Now you're feeling and now you're thinking.
So at the moment of death, the point is that this doesn't change.
The theory is, that we subscribe to, is that this doesn't change because there's no reason for it to change.
The physical aspect of our reality is really just a part of experience, moment to moment to moment to moment experience that continues on.
It really helps to make sense of why the universe is the way it is.
It's very much based on past causes and conditions.
And so the future as well will be based on these same causes and conditions.
If our mind is impure, as the Buddha says, suffering follows us.
If our mind is pure, then happiness follows us.
So this is how we understand that a person who does good deeds benefits both in this life and in the next.
And it's very much a part of our practice of meditation.
Through the practice of meditation we're purifying our minds.
We're overcoming greed and desire to gain this and that because we're understanding that it's a cause for suffering.
And we're purifying.
The word he uses is
kamma visuddhi nattamo.
Visuddhi means purity.
So it's the purity of our acts.
An act is pure or is defiled, as I think you all are aware, based on the intentions of the mind.
So even if you walk, you can walk with an impure mind.
You can speak.
When you speak, you can speak with a pure and impure mind.
And obviously the practice of meditation is what's allowing us to see purity and impurity, and to refine our behavior so that our reactions to things... This is really what you're doing, because again and again you're reacting to things, and you'll see your reactions to things, and you'll slowly refine those reactions until it just becomes an interaction.
You're not liking things or disliking things, you're just being with them.
Okay, now I'm seeing, now I'm hearing, now I have pain, now I have pleasure.
and so on and you're not clinging to anything this is as the Buddha said in the Satipatthana Sutta we dwell not clinging to anything so just another brief teaching something more for us to keep in mind when we do our practice that this is really what we're doing is purifying our thoughts and our speech and our deeds so thanks for listening and back to meditation