Dhammapada

The date is August 6th, 1981. This is the sixth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on The Great Spiritual Classics of the Orient from 2500 BC to 300 AD. Tonight's lecture is Dhammapada the first shaping of Buddha's words the path of truth according to the old tradition.

And we live in recent times. Apparently the words of the Dhamma are not to be heard by crowds not just by... He said sometimes you have to be like an elephant alone in the forest. Just go ahead and walk that way, it's alright.

I thought we would begin tonight. There is a wonderful, short, I guess you could call it a prayer. Buddhist prayer. It is used in Sri Lanka a lot and in Burma, Thailand, all places which preserve the old teachings still. And its name in Pali is Metta bhavana. Metta bhavana. And it's actually, I guess technically they would call it a thought wave, instead of a prayer, because instead of just directed out to some higher power it is generated from the integrity within to all. And the Metta bhavana runs like this in translation: “We surround all men and all forms of life with infinite love and compassion. Particularly do we send out compassionate thoughts to those in suffering and sorrow to all those in doubt and ignorance, to all who are striving to attain truth. And to those whose feet are standing close to the great change men call death we send forth oceans of wisdom mercy and love.”

And in this little pebble in the Metta bhavana you get sort of the the essential simple clarity of the message of the Buddha and the Dhammapada being the original collection of verses of his sayings sort of the collected things as if you would take the sayings of Jesus out of the New Testament and put them all together in one book. The Dhammapada is the collection of sayings, about 423 of them, attributed to the man who founded that religion. I have two other short introductions. One, the primordial symbol of the follower of the way is the notion of a begging bowl. And it's not begging in the sense of pleading with someone for something, but rather it is a bowl shaped for the hands to accept whatever there is to sustain and nourish the life that one has here because it is nourishing something which does not need food or begging or sacrifice. And I thought I would pass this around while I talked about the Dhammapada tonight. And this particularly fine begging bowl is from Thailand. The third thing and we'll get to the top here is. I have a leaf here from a Bodhi tree which was brought over from India and transplanted here in Los Angeles about six years ago. And it was in the Temple Bell Garden of the International Buddhist Meditation Center over in New Hampshire, [inaudible] who has since passed on, was the head abbot over there. And this little Bodhi tree was growing right next to the temple bell which was a peace bell which was sent over from Vietnam to the United States about 19. I think we got it about 1975. And what the monks had done in Vietnam was they had gathered all the guns that had been left by the dead on both sides for several years and they melted them down and made a peace bell and sent it to the United States. And it's here in Los Angeles where this little Bodhi tree was planted next to this Peace Bell Temple and it began to die and people brought in gardeners, and they brought in experts and they weren't coming along. And finally a very dear friend of mine, a little tiny Sri Lankan monk, went out and grabbed some fronds from palm trees and wove a small thatched hut to put over this. And my little friend Kinanda every day went and took care of that tree. And now of course it's flourishing and doing very well. In fact it has given shoots to two other locations in Los Angeles. But this is the leaf from the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment. And I'll pass this around too. It's just nice to see that the objects still exist and what they did was set the tone.

Shortly after the contact with the Indian, of the Indian subcontinent, the contact with the Greek armies of Alexander the Great there arose the idea of an empire in the minds of several great families in one planned marriage succeeded in establishing an empire by sword in India. The son of the founder of the Maurya Empire, his name was Ashoka, a very famous individual in history. And he convened a council about 244 BC outside, just north of Patna on the Ganges river, and he had placed around the empire. He also disbanded the armies and he took the implements of war and had them recast and he raised up pillars that contained the basic simple laws of decent life and had them placed at all the gateways of the empire much like the Peace Bell in our garden here in Los Angeles. And then we erected in front of the Bodhi tree in Gaya, a large stone platform that had engraved on it the earliest symbol of the Buddha which was not as a man or anything but simply as the foot indicating a path and then the arch of the foot the dharmachakra the wheel of truth and it was just the simplest way. And a friend of mine was there, three years ago, some 2500 years later, and the dharmachakra had been rubbed off because people have made impressions like this. But this cloth was rubbed on the stone feet in front of the original Bodhi tree. And this was, this was the earliest symbol of this individual whose collected homilies we're going to take a look at tonight. And in fact very often in contemporary India the dust covers the Buddha's footsteps in pairs of feet. And then to reaffirm that there's nothing particularly difficult about understanding the truth. Very very clear. And we of all creatures are made to understand it.

Now the Dhammapada in terms of this lecture series is very similar to the Confucian Analects. That is, when we began we've been alternating between India and China. We began in India with the Rig Veda. And in China with the I Ching. And we discovered that as sort of a distilled insight from the Rig Veda we have the Upanishads and similarly as a distilled insight from the I Ching we have the Tao Te Ching. And as we saw that somewhat contemporaneously with the Tao Te Ching sort of a compliment as the lower part of a sine wave that the Confucian Analects which were a collection of homilies about how to live life in linking things together showing you that you have the shape human life. And we have to do this together all the time to survive literally. Very similar to this is the Dhammapada, with pada meaning path, like from foot to head. The Sanskrit is very close to pada so the pada is the path. It's the place where the heads go on the feet. And Dhamma is sort of a Sanskrit with a southern accent. And in Sanskrit it's Dharma. And if you say it with a slight drawl it's Dhamma and that's how the Pali is.

So Dhammapada has a relationship as an entity to the Upanishads in somewhat of a loose way as the analytic path to the Tao Te Ching. This is a distillation of the ancient wisdom. This is a distillation of the ancient wisdom brought together in collections of verses to give us a chance to sort of have a shaping for our life. In terms of the location of the Dhammapada in Buddhist literature. It occupies a very very small corner in a collection of works called the Pitaka, the basket. The P-I-T-A-K-A, Pitaka, or baskets. There are three of these baskets, or three of these Pitaka. The first one is just more or less a collection of books of rules and regulations and suggestions for the monks for the what, the collection of monks is called the Sangha. And this first Pitaka, this first basket of writing is called the Vinaya Pitaka. The second basket is called the Sutta. And that's the southern accent for pronunciation of the word sutra - Sutra, Sutta. And the Sutta Pitaka contains all of the discourses of many long discourses. And short discourses and in one little small collection of the Dhammapada is sort of like the tail end set by itself. It's not very thick, it's about 60 pages at the most - 423 verses - yet appended in the Sutta Pitaka to a collection of early dialogues of the Buddha.

The Buddha, like Socrates, never wrote anything in terms of a treatise or a book or anything. Had a genius for apparently addressing himself forthrightly to whoever was there but never cared to go back and write something dispassionately for someone who was not there. Never had that feeling. Socrates as we'll see in the next series when we do the Classics of Ancient Greece. Socrates and the Buddha, very very peculiar in that sense. Evidently quite able to speak many languages to shape their thoughts, could well have written books but on purpose shied away from that mode. At any rate all that we have are reported dialogues, words. So the Dhammapada as it comes down to us is in twenty-six chapters and in the original Sanskrit they all have names, and the last part of the name is always ‘vaggo’ like the first one is Yamakavaggo, Dandavaggo and so forth. All of them have that word in. There have been attempts to translate the various chapter headings and I think really the one that Juan Mascaro used in the Penguin Classics is probably as easy for us to relate to. Mascaro was not too bad. And they have titles like this. The first one is, Contrary Ways; the second one, Watchfulness; the third, The Mind, and so on. All the way down to the end, to number 26. I'll take you through it so that it won't be a mystery.

And you'll see what we're talking about. Basically you have to know just a little bit about his life. He was born around the time of Confucius, really. They were almost contemporaries and he... I guess the traditional dates would run around 570, maybe around 550 BC, dying around 480 BC at the age of 80. So, well I guess that would make it 560 to 480. Around that time period it's not totally exact. He was born into a family of some wealth and position. His father, quite well off; his mother died very soon after he was born and his father took another wife and he was raised in the palace. He was married. Yasuda was his wife's name. He had a son Rahula. In fact many old venerable monks that one might see traveling around the world now will have the name Rahula. It was very fashionable in the Edwardian times to award this name to very outstanding monks. For instance, I don't know if any of you had a chance to see him three years ago but the greatest elder monk of the Theravada traditions named Walpola Rahula and he came here to Los Angeles delivered a tremendously warm-hearted kind of a speech. He looked like Barry Fitzgerald the movie star, the Irish movie star. I couldn't believe this kindly old Irish face on this Buddhist monk from Ceylon. But it shouldn't come as any surprise that we are not just as we seem and we have been many things.

He incidentally said that it does no good to pride oneself on the color of one's robe or even on the fact that you have a robe because the Dharma has no robe and no color. And he said it smilingly to all these rows and rows of people in their fine robes and my ears sort of picked up in the back and I straightened myself and was proud I had dungarees on. Rahula was the son of the Buddha and his personal name was Siddhartha, and the family name was Gautama. In Sanskrit it spelled G-A-U-T-A-M-A, but in the southern drawl of Pali it's Gotama - G-O. He was protected from seeing a lot of the outside world because he had manifested, very early, tendencies - you can tell with children what they're going to be like and his father didn't want him to become an ascetic. It was at that time all the rage in the society of India. The mountains, the forests were filled with wandering ascetics, mendicants of every persuasion and every kind. It was simply like in our time an epidemic of the absolute drive to find out what is going on in life. Why are we here? Why is any of this here? Is there any sense with it all? And can I know? And people will seek any teacher, any place, to find out.

So Siddhartha had been protected from this and kept pretty much into the castle grounds, the palatial estate grounds. And as the legends go he one day peering over one of the walls saw a cripple and was shocked that someone had the ungraciousness to look so terrible. And upon informing one of his servants and in the more esoteric traditions his faithful servant’s name was Channa, and Channa told him that this was quite the usual thing. And so Siddhartha was taken outside of the wall to see life and he was shocked, he was stunned that almost everyone who was not in royal means or in wealth was crippled, disgusted, heart out. In short he saw life at its most brutal and he decided he couldn't live with any more conscience stay at home. He left and for seven years wandered. He went on the regular pilgrimages to the various caves and forest retreats. He practiced every kind of ascetic discipline available to him. In fact in northwest Pakistan, in the Gandharan, the old Gandharan area, where the Greek and the Buddhist art criss-crossed about the third century BC there is a famous statue of Siddhartha as ascetic and he is meditating - I should have brought an illustration. All that is showing are his ribs and his bone structure and the fierce determination in the face slightly bewhiskered and just this determination that he would sacrifice anything to get through. And of course it did not work.

And as the legend would have it, he wandering out of the mountains began to eat again, to take care of himself again, to wash up to have a little bit more easy comportment. And he discovered that this middle path in between letting oneself go in revelry, or forcing oneself in ascetic practices, in between is the middle path and that this middle path is the real ground wherein one can approach meaning. In other words, this practice of finding out is very similar to trying to define a word. And the definition is always a shaping around something, so that when we have circumambulated the possibilities, we have shaped and defined it or finding out is largely creating some kind of a structure wherein we can glimpse, prismatically, the nature of reality. And the only thing we have to watch out for is not to mistake the illusory shape that we use to look through to reality, for reality. Not to use the form for anything but a guide, a hermetic star guide. It shows that life but it is the life that we see and not the God.

So in his perambulating, in the spirit on the middle path, he came to a spot, a fork in the road where one of these Bodhi trees had been planted. And he sat down and all through the night he was extremely restless, unable to sleep. And in this state of churning he began to notice that he had found a rhythm in his anxiety that it was beginning to flow in a recognizable pattern. And so as he went with that pattern it began to like any energy modulation it began to fan out into identifiable forms, and of course being used to seeing through the form to the beyond he entered a very deep state of what they call in Sanskrit samadhi - a quietude a presence of inner spiritual attentiveness - and carried himself in that. It's almost like a gap between two points. He carried himself in the flow of that presence and suddenly the evening morning star, Venus, rose over the horizon and in his deep samadhi it's rising in physicality in the phenomenal realm was very fast because his time sense had extenuated out to where he was not temporizing very much psychological time at that stage stretches almost into infinity. And so in that presence not observing it immediately with physical eye but later noting that with the inner eye the rising of that star that literal guiding light he had that realization that deep penetration through to what he later styled, nirvana - nirvana.

He was 35 years old and he came up that day. And like most intense seekers of his time he had somewhat of a small entourage and the practice of the day was to enter into discourse. And in this logical bantering, in this sizing up of one's sense of truth than light and so forth, one would take the position and call him master who had a better view than you. It was no great thing to meet someone who was simply your superior in these matters and one would then apprentice himself to that person until they found someone who was even better. And so the code of the day was that you don't feel bad when you feel that you have met someone superior, but rather you adopt their views. They have shown you, they have convinced you, and that's what it is. It's a tradition in Asia. It was a tradition in classical Greece which we lost in the Roman Empire. I won't go into that. Why we lost it there.

So at age 35 Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha the enlightened one. And in his walking around India and he spans some 300 miles by I suppose it must have been about 250 miles - quite a large area really. He walked for 45 years speaking and had introduced into this society of India, perhaps for the first time, the notion that family did not determine it, wealth did not determine it, ancient traditions did not determine it. That anyone regardless of who they were were welcome to come in and study the Dharma. That the Dharma was for beings and that there was no way that any condition in the phenomenal world either on this planet or any other planet could condition the situation of a sentient being so that it could not reach nirvana. And this was a shock to the Indian society of his day. He was a real radical in terms of social-political influence. And later on when the Empire builders came in it was everything that they could do to handle Buddhism. As a matter of fact when we get to Gandhi, we'll see that the leader of the untouchables in the 1950s converted all the untouchables in India to Buddhism. It was a mass conversion of some 6 million people - that was in our own time - to sort of again sidestep this whole caste frozen relationality which still plagues India to this day.

Well this was 2500 years ago and after walking for 45 years all over he was up in an area on towards the mountains called Kusinagara. And he at age 80 took sick - some say it was a bowl of bad food. Whatever it was he assured the monks that his body was worn out and there was no sense in trying to carry it on, that he was in deep pain except when he went into a deep meditation. So he made his preparations to leave this phenomenal world. And all the monks began gathering around. And as word spread a vast field of seekers presented themselves and surrounded the supine figure of the Buddha. And the sutra, the doctrine that records this, they they called the Buddha's death not death but parinibbana. nibbana is a southern dialect pronunciation of nirvana - nirvana, nirvana. And pari means the above, the beyond. And the first word in the sutras. Maha which means great. So the Mahaparinirvana Sutra is the record of the last words of the Buddha to his disciples at age 80. And it's a pretty good written record probably as true as any record we would have. Because they were the last words they would have been recorded very assiduously in the mind. You have to remember these people were trained to hear. They were practicing for 25 or 35 or 40 years in deep meditation and when one does this for a long, long duration the inner sense of the capacity to shape reality into defining shapes becomes extended, greatly big, almost asymptotically. We'll get into that aspect again later on in this series. We'll run into it in Homer, in the classical Greek. It's just the capacity for the mind to memorize shapes of meaning becomes enormously attenuated.

So at the end of the Mahaparinirvana Sutra this is how it runs. And these are the last words of that person, then we'll get to the Dhammapada. Among the congregation of all the monks and the people and so forth his favorite friend Ananda - Addressing Ananda the Exalted One said it may be Ananda that it will seem to you the one who taught the Dhamma is gone. There is no teacher for us. It should not be taken so. My Dhamma and Vinaya, which I pointed out to you clearly, these are your teachers when I am gone. The Buddha further gave instructions regarding the mode of address to be used as amongst bhikkhu's - that is elder monks - stated that the Sangha - the collection of people in the Dhamma - stated that the Sangha could, if it wished, abolish the minor precepts and spoke of the treatment to be accorded to one particular defaulting bhikkhu namely that he should be left alone. You see he's closing up shop. He's saying don't worry about the little things. And if this person wants to go off by himself let him go. quieting everything down for the final exit.

He then returned to the Bhikkhus' presence and said it may seem because Bhikkus that some people feel uncertainty or doubt concerning the Buddha or even the Dharma or the Sangha or the way, or mode of progress. Ask about it Bikkhus. Do not afterwards have reasons to reproach yourself. Do not say our master was face to face with us. We were in his presence face to face with the Exalted One. And we did not put a question to him. The Bikkhus were all silent. The Exalted One asked them for a second time and then a third time. But they were silent. Then the Exalted One said it may be Bikkhus that you do not ask out of respect for the teacher. Speak Bikkhus as a friend to a friend. None of this great guru overwhelming worshipful awe it has no place. Speak as a friend to a friend. The Bikkhus were silent. Venerable Ananda said to the Exalted One. It is wonderful sir. I see clearly that in this Sangha of Biko's there is not one who has any uncertainty or doubt concerning the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, the way, or the mode of progress. It is from confidence that you have spoken Ananda. The insight of the Tathagata perceives here - Tagathata is the word meaning those who have gone, literally means thus gone. Tathagatas are those who are in the way and no longer here. The insight of the Tathagata perceives here there is not one who has doubt or perplexity concerning the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, the way, or the mode of progress. In this gathering of 500 Bikkhus, Ananda, the lowest Bikkhu is a sotapanna certain of not falling into a place of suffering and sure of enlightenment at the final end. Then the exalted one said to the Bikkhus and this was the end, this was it.

Now because I call upon you conditioned things are things of decay. With vigilance work out your own salvation. Sometimes I translate it as diligence. And that was it. And he passed on. He died with the simple admonition that we are to work out our own way. Well to help us there have been collections galore. And in the 2500 years since that event, the Dhammapada has become slowly and surely the single best introduction into the primordial shaping matrix mentality of Buddhism. And I have selected for you about twenty percent of the Dhammapada. That doesn't amount to very much to give you. Just as in the Confucian Analects some basic first hand acquaintance through a very good translation. Mascaro was born in Mallorca. He was a Spanish mystic. Although he did a lot of things he was a teacher. He was a master at Cambridge University. He lived in a private retreat above Tintern Abbey in England alone for many years. He was married. He's quite old now. He has as a son and a daughter; very capable individual. He studied Sanskrit for many years. Very capable of giving a fine translation.

The Dhammapada the first of the 26 collected chapters called Contrary Ways, begins like this. And these are words remembered from the Buddha and recollected later. Probably the first Council was convened by Kashyapa just at the at just after the Parinirvana be about 480 BC. The second was 100 years later at the Salle - it would have been about 380 BC. And then the third convened by Ashoka, 244,k would have been about the time by the Third Council the Dhammapada would have been collected together and written down Pervertedly. Why people write things down is so as not to forget them. And later on when we take the great tradition we'll see Plato's admonition from the Pharaoh and Egypt about the follies of writing any wisdom down. That there's no way in which to let people forget faster and for them to think that it's on the shelf over there anytime they want to get to it. They'll never get to it.

“Contrary Ways
What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is a creation of our mind. If a man speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows him as the wheel of the cart follows the beast that draws the cart. What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind. If a man speaks or acts with a pure mind, joy follows him as his own shadow… For hate is not conquered by hate: hate is conquered by love. This is a law eternal… Those who think the unreal is and think the Real is not, they shall never reach the Truth, lost in the path of wrong thought. But those who know the Real is, and know the unreal is not, they shall indeed reach the Truth, safe on the path of right thought. Even as rain breaks through an ill-thatched house, passions will break through an ill-guarded mind. But even as rain breaks not through a well-thatched house, passions break not through a well-guarded mind.”

This whole idea of guarding the mind of the… we'll see in the next chapter Watchfulness. Much much later on, and probably next year in our lecture series when we get to the avatara of Santideva, the idea of the every man being like a bodhisattva having to guard his mind and that the whole discipline of enlightenment is simply refining the guarding down until everything has been taken care of and that itself is real. So this.

“Even as rain breaks not through a well-thatched house, passions break not through a well-guarded mind… Whereas if a man speaks but a few holy words and yet he lives the life of those words, free from passion and hate and illusion - with right vision and a mind free, craving for nothing both now and hereafter - the life of this man is a life of holiness… Those who with a clear mind have seen this truth, those who are wise and ever-watchful, they feel the joy of watchfulness, the joy of the path of the Great.”

So the second chapter in the Dhammapada, after Contrary Ways, after setting up what is and what is not, comes Watchfulness, Attentiveness.

“And those who in high thought and deep contemplation with ever living power advance on the path, they in the end reach Nirvana, the peace supreme and infinite joy. The man who arises in faith, who ever remembers his high purpose, whose work is pure, and who carefully considers his work, who in self-possession lives the life of perfection, and who ever, for ever, is watchful, that man shall arise in glory.”

And by arise they mean literally this kind of vectoring out of the morass of polarity. Literally rising up in one's daily vision. It isn't that you rise up off the ground but that your capacity becomes refined to see and do and the effort and travail of it begins to subside. And it literally is like scuffing clouds, that kind of an inner kinesthetic balance which comes. When it comes all of a sudden to primordial man, he thought he was flying and that's why some of the old shamans wear the feathers or the fringes and all the bangles and spread their arms out. Remember that film Chac [1975]? Yeah, it feels like flying. We'll see some slides tonight from Dunhuang from the caves in the middle of the Gobi desert that were lost for a thousand years. And when they portray spirituality they portray the clothes of the people floating up as if it were zero gravity. That is to say we don't have to stay here. It's not inevitably necessary, so “arise in glory” means that.

“The wise man who by watchfulness conquers thoughtlessness is as one who free from sorrows ascends the palace of wisdom…” It's a very famous phrase: the palace of wisdom, the city of God, the house of the Lord. All this is in that same phrase. “…the palace of wisdom and there, from its high terrace, sees those in sorrow below; even as a wise strong man on the holy mountain might behold the many unwise far down below on the plain.” On the plain in the sense that they are, they are trapped in time-space. They are trapped in the ordinary coordinates of polarized existence and they are literally on a two-dimensional plane and do not exist in reality yet and have to rise to the palace of wisdom. And from those terraces one can see that that heaven-like suspended vision what has been going on.

And so the third chapter in the Dhammapada is The Mind - Contrary Ways, Watchfulness - up to the palace of wisdom idea. And now The Mind.

“The Mind is wavering and restless, difficult to guard and restrain: let the wise man straighten his mind as a maker of arrows makes his arrow straight.” The whole simile of archery, the notion of a target, the notion of skill, and that the mind is actually a process vector. It makes up a synthesis of various elements constantly to feed you direction. And that direction, if it's Zigzagging, even though it may be wonderfully melodramatic, it goes nowhere but to confusion. Whereas, if it's straight it goes to the only place it could go to what is real. So make like a maker of arrows making his arrow straight. Straighten the mind so that the mind will think that thought and not just all these. And think through that form to their yoga.

“The mind is fickle and flighty, it flies after fancies wherever it likes: it is difficult indeed to restrain. But it is a great good to control the mind; a mind self-controlled is a source of great joy… Hidden in the mystery of consciousness, the mind, incorporeal, flies alone far away. Those who set their mind in harmony become free from the bonds of death.”

This was collected about 400 BC. you can notice the quantum jump in capacity to express by 400 BC, 500 BC from the earlier all the elements were there in the Rig Veda or the I Ching but they were ritualistically hidden from expressive consciousness. They began to emerge by the time of the Tao Te Ching and the Analects and the Upanishads. But just here is just as if a surface tension is broken and meaning flames into real shape. We'll see that the same thing happened in classical Greece that the difference between one generation and the next was unbelievable. And the same thing here in this generation, all of a sudden the capacity to express spiritual insight was suddenly there.

The fourth chapter of the Dhammapada, The Flowers of Life. And a lot of these verses have flower similes or metaphors. “He who knows that this body is the foam of a wave, the shadow of a mirage, he breaks the sharp arrows of Mara…” - Mara is the universal temptress who wants us to believe in illusion - “...concealed in the flowers of sensuous passions and unseen by the king of death, he goes on and follows his path… As the bee takes the essence of a flower and flies away without destroying its beauty and perfume, so let the sage wander in this light.” This is a beautiful simile. Very often he is gathering the nectar of wisdom like bees visiting flowers. They don't damage the flowers. They help propagate them. They make the nourishment. The perfume of flowers goes not against the wind, not even the perfume of sandalwood or rose bay or of jasmine. But the perfume of virtue travels against the wind and reaches the ends of the world.

And there's a chapter on The Fool, Chapter five, The Fool is as you must know an archetypal image. It's always with the fool. “If on the great journey of life a man cannot find one who is better or at least as good as himself, let him joyfully travel alone: a fool cannot help him on his journey… If during the whole of his life a fool lives with a wise man, he never knows the path of wisdom as the spoon never knows the taste of the soup… A fool who thinks he is wise goes through life with himself as his enemy, he ever does wrong deeds which in the end, bear bitter fruit… And if ever to his own harm the fool increases in cleverness, this only destroys his mind and his fate is worse than before… ‘Let householders and hermits, both, think it was I who did that work; and let them ask me what they should do or not do’.”

These are the thoughts of a fool puffed up with desire and pride. And then the sixth part is The Wise Man. “He who drinks of the waters of Truth, he rests in joy with mine serene. The wise find their delight in the Dhamma, in the Truth revealed by the great. Those who make channels for water control the waters; makers of arrows make the arrows straight; carpenters control their timber; and the wise control their own minds.” I'm just selecting out. There are dozens and dozens of verses for each of these chapters. I'm just taking 1 or 2 from each just to give you the tone and also the linking through because the Dhammapada is not just an aggregate collection but is a shaping towards a definition of enlightenment. Seven is called Infinite Freedom, and in the original it's called the Arahanta-vaggo or The Way of the arhat. The arhat is someone who has achieved a lot on the path enough to be able to tell right from wrong, truth from untruth. And I guess the closest thing in English would be the saint. The saint. Arahanta is the saint.

Well this Infinite Freedom is originally entitled Arahanta or The Way of the Saint. And it has two verses which I selected out which are just exquisite in their expressivity of ultimate spiritual insight. It's just like a mudra in words. And these are the two. They're all numbered. Incidentally these are verses 93 and 94 of the Dhammapada.

“Who can trace the invisible path of the man who soars in the sky of liberation, the infinite void without beginning, whose passions are peace, and over whom pleasures have no power? His path is as difficult to trace as that of birds in the air. The man who wisely controls his senses as a good driver controls his horses and who is free from lower passions and pride, is admired even by the gods.”

This notion again of like being in heaven suspends its emblem that is in the suspension of pure space as place. That a real spiritual circumambulation can begin to define in forms that are not tied down to any kind of a grounded or two-dimensional orientation. They're literally up in the air and the only coordinates that we have are the true paths of circling and return coming back and seeing, of looking, with diligence and learning and building from what we have done. And so who can trace the invisible path of the man who soars in the sky of liberation the infinite void without beginning with passions or peace and over whom pleasures have no power. His path is as difficult to trace as that of the birds in the air. Then comes a chapter that is just entitled, Better than a Thousand. There are lots of homilies here.