Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse 146, which reads as follows, konu-haso kimmanando nityam panjalitesati andhakare naonadha padipang na gavesata, which means,
What is this?
What is this laughter?
Wherefore the joy?
When there's fire everywhere.
When there is flames, there's always flames.
There's constant flame.
Burning.
When there is constant burning.
For one who is shrouded by darkness.
For those.
You who are shrouded by darkness.
You don't seek out a light.
This is another memorable story of the Buddha.
There's two versions of it.
There's the reasonable Jataka version, and then there's the, some might say, over the top Dhammapada version.
So I'm not really sure which one to focus on.
The Dhammapada version is quite entertaining, but I think some people would argue it's not perhaps as accurate as the Jataka version.
What they have in common is it's about the companions of Wisaka.
Wisaka, who was a great Buddhist lay disciple, a Sotapanna who would never engage in any impropriety.
And so she had these friends.
And Wisaka was in an interesting position because she was married to a man who wasn't Buddhist.
There's a long story about that.
And basically, those times, marriage was often about securing connections between wealthy families.
And so she became a part of that.
But because she was so humble, she didn't even argue, or she didn't
get upset about it at all.
But then she had great trouble and ended up getting in a real fight with her stepfather, no, her father-in-law, her husband's father.
He got very angry at her.
It's a long story.
It's not our story here.
But the story we have here is of some of her friends who, in this environment, were perhaps, well, were clearly not so inclined towards purity and goodness.
Maybe they weren't such terrible people, but they were perhaps misled.
And all of their husbands got together on a drinking festival and got really roaring, stinking drunk.
But the wives, of course, they had to do all the preparations and they weren't allowed to get drunk.
Now the Dhammapada story says that they got drunk anyway.
They convinced Visakha to take them into this pleasure garden and they got drunk.
They could be away from the eyes of their husbands.
They took strong drink, it says, and
We sat and asked them, what are you going to do?
Your husbands are going to be all upset.
If you go home, they'll know you're drunk.
And sure enough, when they got back, their husbands beat them all.
And they didn't learn.
This is the Dhammapada story.
The Jataka story doesn't have any of this.
It comes a bit later.
But then they still wanted to get drunk.
And so they asked Visakha, they said, hey, let's go to the garden again.
He said, no, no, I'm not having anything to do with you anymore.
And they said, well, then take us to see the Buddha.
She said, for me, I'm Buddhist, and I follow the Buddha's teaching.
Strong drink is something that destroys your mindfulness.
That's what's important about this story for us as meditators.
And they said, well, then take us to see the Buddha.
There's anything to get them out of the house, right?
So she took them to see the Buddha, and they snuck alcohol jugs under their dresses, under their cloaks.
And so they all showed up at the monastery of the Buddha.
It would have been Jetavana.
If you've ever been to India, it's a beautiful place.
And so they sat down, and the Buddha started preaching.
And they smuggled the alcohol out, and they all got drunk.
And so the Buddha was preaching, but they couldn't hear the tipping back and forth.
And then they got it in their heads that they would start dancing.
And so they all got up and started dancing in front of the Buddha.
And then the Dhammapada story says, again this is where it gets a little bit exaggerated maybe, but it says there was a Mara angel, a deity of the Mara realms, the evil, the mischievous realms.
who decided it would be a good idea to get these women to act really improper.
And so she sort of possessed them or something and got them all to strip off their clothes and dance around naked in front of the Buddha.
Quite a sight.
And so both stories make clear that the Buddha sent forth some sort of
special magical power, some projection of color, of very dark rays of, not lightness, but rays of darkness, or dark blue light or something.
And it frightened them.
It shocked them back into sobriety somehow.
And then he taught this verse.
Why are you laughing?
Wherefore the joy when there is constant flame?
It's burning constantly.
The world, the commentary says he's referring to the word, the world is burning, actually.
So it sounds, I think, for the ordinary listener, it sounds kind of exciting.
I imagine for the meditators there might be a twinge, a slight...
thought of, oh, dancing and singing and maybe even alcohol.
I suppose if you've started meditating, alcohol is less and less appealing as you start to see how messed up your mind already is without alcohol.
But dancing and singing, they seem like wonderful things.
It's exciting, right?
It releases all sorts of pleasant chemicals in the brain and makes you feel lots of pleasure.
We don't see the fire.
Intoxication is an interesting topic.
Alcohol is something that intoxicates you.
We should talk about this because it's an issue in meditation practice, the living of your life.
What are the things that are going to support your practice?
What are the things that are going to hinder it?
Alcohol is one of the things that's the antithesis of meditation.
It's the opposite.
Meditation is about clearing your mind, trying to cultivate the habit of seeing things clearly as they are, and alcohol is for the explicit purpose of dulling and muddling things so that you can't see things, so that your ordinary reactions to things are dulled.
As a result, you never feel any pain or any suffering.
You're just able to
Do whatever you want.
Cultivate whatever bad habits you like.
You get angry and there's no consequences because you're not aware of them.
And that's really the thing about alcohol is that it blinds you to the nature of your actions.
I've told this story before, but there was one night
remember explicitly, I mean I used to get drunk and thinking back I don't suppose I did a lot of terrible things but there was one night that I remember explicitly I was just fell in with the wrong crowd and ended up going around stealing other people's alcohol and waking people up and bothering people in the middle of the night and
getting into all sorts of trouble and ended up seriously damaging friendships as a result.
I've had so many stories of the results of alcohol.
Abuse comes from alcohol.
Violence of all sorts.
Of course, sexual promiscuity comes.
Unwanted pregnancies, I imagine.
But it cultivates all sorts of terrible bad habits.
It allows your mind the freedom to be as evil as you want.
You could be good under alcohol, I suppose.
It's possible that under alcohol you could be quite nice to people.
There are times, you know, the happy drunk who sits there and says, I love you, man, that kind of thing.
You could argue there's some wholesomeness going on there.
Yeah, there's a lot of delusion and unwholesomeness as well.
But it prevents you from being able to see clearly.
It's the very essence of what it does.
So first of all, that's something we have to be clear about, that things like drinking alcohol, most drugs as well, are highly problematic for meditation practice.
Marijuana, I think, is an obvious one.
It just makes things too distorted.
People who do marijuana might argue I've done it before.
I never really did a lot of marijuana for a time.
Problematic.
It doesn't allow you to have a clear mind and to see things clearly as they are.
These things, marijuana and alcohol in general, are meant to dull things, are meant to bring positive states only and allow you, free you from the need to experience the harshness of reality, because reality can be quite harsh.
If you're not well trained and sharp as a diamond, it will cut you.
So the first part, the other part is that it allows us to talk about another kind of intoxication.
It's the intoxication of ordinary people.
Intoxication that's present in all of us at all times.
Not at all times, but throughout our lives.
Regardless of what we're taking into our bodies, it's coming from our own minds.
Just the chemicals in the brain, this is enough to intoxicate anyone.
In Buddhism, the Buddha mentions, I think, four types of intoxication, or three types of intoxication.
Intoxication with youth, intoxication with health, and intoxication with life.
I can't remember if there's a fourth, but.
So young people, young people are intoxicated with youth.
That's what leads us to far more drugs and alcohol than, well, to do far more than we would otherwise.
We're young, right?
In teenage years, some people never grow out of it, but
When we're young, we're inclined to do all sorts of crazy things, thinking we're never going to die and there'll be no consequence.
It's unfortunate because there's so much potential, and that's what you get intoxicated by, infinite potential.
So do whatever you want, no consequences.
But there are consequences.
That's the unfortunate part.
When we're young, that's when we have the power.
The Buddha said, this practice is not for old people.
You have all these Buddhists nowadays, and even in the Buddhist time, saying, oh, when I get old, then I'll practice.
When I'm retired, right?
It was a thing in the Buddhist time, even.
Old men would go off into the forest and tend to the flame.
It was about all they were good for, is pouring butter on a flame.
It was a religious practice.
Forget about meditation.
Some old people can be very good meditators, it's not to say.
But the Buddha said, this is a hard practice.
If you've spent your life engaged in unwholesomeness, it gets more and more difficult.
It's not to disparage people who are older who practice, but it's to wake up those people who are intoxicated with youth and think, oh, I've got lots of time.
Sure, you have lots of time, but lots of time spent cultivating unwholesome habits is just setting yourself up for disaster.
When you come around to do meditation, you've built up all these bad habits, and you're no longer in a state to be able to meditate.
We're intoxicated with health.
I feel healthy, fit.
Healthy and fit, thinking illness will never come to me.
I get intoxicated by it.
It doesn't really matter whether I have to talk about getting old or getting sick.
Of course, that's the reality of it, right?
You could get sick at any time, and you're going to get old, and youth will not last forever.
But more to the point is just being attached and becoming intoxicated with your youth and your health.
Healthy people get so wrapped up in materialism, exercising, running, dancing, singing.
You see these women dancing and singing, enjoying their bodies.
so much that they became intoxicated.
It's interesting because this is what you start to see in meditation, that reality is quite a bit harsher than we think it is.
And so you have two options.
You can spend your time intoxicating yourself, either with external substances or just with the chemicals in your brain.
Find ways to find pleasure again and again.
It's intoxicating.
It blinds you to the reality.
You feel pain.
You feel stress.
Go off and take your drug.
Shoot up in the brain.
And it's repressed for a while.
Of course, it gets worse the next time it comes and worse and worse until you become a drug addict.
Whether it's external drugs or brain drugs, it's all the same.
And then eventually it's compounded by the fact that you do get old and you do get sick.
And then you're totally unprepared for death and you wind up a real mess.
Or reborn as a dog or a pig or something.
Really, who knows when your mind is not clear.
The third intoxication is intoxication
intoxicated by life, intoxication with life.
I'm alive.
Carpe diem, seize the day.
The stupidest thing in the world.
This precious thing called life, right?
This precious life.
And then you say, yeah, so let's do whatever we can to mess it up because we're going to die tomorrow, right?
We could die any time.
Well, it makes sense if there's nothing after.
If there's nothing after life, then
No, it doesn't even make sense then.
This is what I've talked about, is that even if we were to die and never be reborn again, it would make no sense to intoxicate yourself further.
That's what we don't get.
That's what you start to see in meditation.
Meditation seems so stressful.
Wouldn't it be nicer if we danced?
When I was in Florida, someone was talking about laughter yoga or something, laughing yoga.
I don't know.
As a Buddhist, you sometimes have to bite your tongue with all these spiritual practices.
Arguably, some of them are positive, but I think they get a little bit indulgent.
Wouldn't it be better if I taught you all how to laugh and solve your problems by laughing?
Sounds more fun.
But that's what meditation shows you.
Insight meditation shows you something different.
It shows you the nature of reality.
It shows you your experience.
And it teaches you to overcome your intoxication.
So recently, the meditation shows you that life is not, or the indulgence, intoxication, it's not actually happiness.
When you're meditating, you can see all of your impurities, we'd call them, but let's think of them as our attachments, our desires.
And you're able to reflect objectively on them.
And as you experience them and experience the things that you want and the wanting of it, you can feel the stress.
You can see how it's actually stressful.
It's like a dog, a hungry dog who sees a bone smeared with blood and thinks, oh, I'll satiate my hunger with that bone.
Gnawing on the bone and can gnaw on the bone forever and will never be satisfied.
will always have this gnawing, stressful feeling of hunger.
That's what you start to see in the meditation.
And then, of course, the fact that there is life after death just compounds that, because people who die when they're on... There was a story recently of someone who
who fell off a roof.
They were on acid and LSD and fell off a roof.
Could you imagine what that would be like?
To die when you're on drugs?
Death can come at any time.
So that's the verse.
That brings us to the verse.
The verse has some interesting aspects.
So why laughter?
Why exultation?
This is the, this is this.
There's a better translation.
Here's the fun translation from the Jataka.
You can all remember this.
Because it rhymes.
No place for laughter here, no room for joy.
The flames of passion suffering worlds destroy.
The flames of passion-suffering worlds destroy.
Why, overwhelmed in darkest night, I pray, seek ye no torch to light you on your way?
It's a good question for all of us, not just these intoxicated women, all of us living in the world chasing after useless things.
distracting ourselves until catastrophe, until tragedy strikes.
And then it's too late.
We're unable to deal with it.
We're untrained, unprepared for it.
Meanwhile, we live our lives content with mediocrity, with stressful lives interspersed with bits of happiness.
We don't see the flames.
We see only the light.
Ooh, pretty, pretty light.
We don't see the burning.
The Buddha gave a whole sutta, a whole discourse on burning.
I won't go into it here, but we have the flames of defilement, the flames of suffering, the flames of old age, sickness, and death.
There are consequences, and there are problematic.
There's something problematic about craving and clinging and desire.
That's what we start to learn in meditation.
That's what you should be able to see as you stay here, as you continue to practice.
We're in darkness means we're in delusion.
This is what intoxication does to you.
This is what our desires and our attachments do.
They blind us to what's really going on.
They blind us to the present moment and the here and now.
So mindfulness is this torch, the Buddha's teaching, but more specifically mindfulness.
Mindfulness is this light that you shine in and it clears up all the darkness immediately.
There's a wonderful thing about mindfulness practice.
You don't have to actually cultivate it.
You can start right now.
You can apply it right now.
At any moment when you wake up and you say, what am I going to do?
Be mindful at that moment.
So this is what you're cultivating, this is what we're working on here, is this ability to manifest the presence of mind that keeps us here and now, that keeps us aware, alert, awake.
Keeps us sober.
So there you go.
There's our Dhammapada first for this evening on intoxication.
Thank you all for tuning in.