Dhammapada Verse 226
Punnadasi Vatthu

Sada jagaramananam
ahorattanusi kkhinam
nibbanam adhimuttanam
attham gacchanti asava.

Verse 226: In those who are ever vigilant, who by day and by night train themselves in the three sikkhas (i.e., sila, samadhi and panna), and who have their mind directed towards Nibbana, moral intoxicants become extinct.

The Story of Punna, the Slave Girl

While residing at the Gijjhakuta mountain, the Buddha uttered Verse (226) of this book, with reference to a slave girl in Rajagaha.

One night, Punna the slave girl was up pounding rice for her master. As she got tired she rested for a while. While resting, she saw Thera Dabba leading some bhikkhus to their respective monasteries on their return from listening to the Dhamma. The girl seeing them up so late, pondered, "I have to be up at this late hour because I am so poor and have to work hard. But, why are these good people up at this late hour? Maybe a bhikkhu is sick, or are they being troubled by a snake?"

Early in the morning the next day, Punna took some broken rice, soaked it in water and made a pan-cake out of it. Then, intending to eat it at the riverside she took her cheap, coarse pan-cake along with her. On the way, she saw the Buddha coming on an alms-round. She wanted to offer her pan-cake to the Buddha, but she was not sure whether the Buddha would condescend to eat such cheap, coarse pan-cake. The Buddha knew her thoughts. He accepted her pan-cake and asked Thera Ananda to spread the small mat on the ground. The Buddha sat on the mat and ate the pan-cake offered by the slave girl. After eating, the Buddha called Punna to him and answered the question which was troubling her. Said the Buddha to the slave girl, "Punna, you cannot go to sleep because you are poor and so have to work hard. As for my sons the bhikkhus, they do not go to sleep because they have to be always vigilant and ever mindful."

Then the Buddha spoke in verse as follows:
Verse 226: In those who are ever vigilant, who by day and by night train themselves in the three sikkhas (i.e., sila, samadhi and panna), and who have their mind directed towards Nibbana, moral intoxicants become extinct.

At the end of the discourse Punna attained Sotapatti Fruition.

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Only when their respective conditions are met can these forms of justice be objective and binding on all. Even in a non-Buddhist worldview, these forms of justice lead to inevitable conflicts. In the Buddha’s worldview, though, it’s impossible that their conditions could ever be met.

This relates to the second set of lessons about justice that the Buddha gained from his awakening, lessons about time and rebirth. In the first knowledge he gained on the night of his awakening, he saw his own past lives, back through countless eons, repeatedly rising and falling through many levels of being and through the evolution and collapse of many universes. As he later said, the beginning point of the process—called samsara, this bad habit we have of “wandering on”—was inconceivable. Not just unknowable. Inconceivable. This means that there can be no clear point from which we can begin the tally of wrongs and rights that retributive justice demands.

In the second knowledge, he saw that the process of death and rebirth applied to all beings in the universe, and that—because it had gone on so long—it would be hard to find a person who had never been your mother, father, brother, sister, son, or daughter in the course of that long, long time. We’ve all been oppressors and oppressed, over and over again.

He also saw that the universe was shaped by the conflicting intentions of all its many beings, and that it serves the designs of no one in particular. As one dhamma summary has it, “There is no one in charge” (Majjhima Nikaya 82). This means that the universe has no purpose, there’s no ideal state to return to, and there’s no source to determine how the goods of the universe should be distributed. So there’s no way that ideas of restorative or distributive justice could be universally binding.

What’s more, the universe has the potential to continue without end. Unlike a monotheistic universe, with its creator passing final judgment, samsara offers no prospect of a fair or just closure—or even, apart from nibbana, any closure at all.

This point has two consequences. The first is that there can be no valid theory of ends justifying the means, because samsara involves nothing but means. This is why the Buddha answered the question of how to attain long-term happiness within the universe not with a demand for a fair society but with a recommendation for meritorious actions—i.e., actions that, in creating happiness and freedom, harm no one.

These actions come down to three: generosity, virtue, and the development of universal goodwill. To provide for your own long-term happiness, you adopt these actions yourself. To provide for the long-term happiness of others, you persuade them to adopt them. Unlike theories of justice, which require stories to justify the punishments they often call for, meritorious actions require no justifications at all. They obviously come from a good heart, and because they spread their goodness all around, they’re genuine means for fostering harmony and peace.

For a just society to be possible, it’s essential that people first train their hearts and minds.

The second consequence of the fact that, aside from nibbana, there is no closure to samsara is that even if you could create a just society, it wouldn’t last. That’s because, unless the human heart is trained, justice wouldn’t satisfy it. As the Buddha commented to Mara—the only being who ever invited him to rule justly over others (Samyutta Nikaya 4:20)—even two mountains the size of the Himalayas made of solid gold wouldn’t be enough to satisfy the wants of any one person. No matter how fairly wealth and opportunities were distributed under your rule, there would always be those dissatisfied with their portions. As a result, there would always be people you’d have to fight in order to maintain your power.

But if you put the salt into the river, you can still drink the water because there’s so much more of it and it’s so clean. All in all, an attractive image, one that appeals to the Angulimala in all of us, in our desire not to be weighed down by any bad actions in our karmic past.

The other two similes, though, look at this principle from another angle, and show that it goes against some very basic ideas of fairness. In one simile, a bad action is like the theft of money; in the other, it is likened to the theft of a goat. In both similes, the untrained mind is like a poor person who, because he’s poor, gets heavily punished for either of these two crimes, whereas the well-trained mind is like a rich person who, because he’s rich, doesn’t get punished for either theft at all. Here it’s hard not to feel sympathy for the poor person, but these images drive home the hard but necessary point that for karma to work in a way that allows us to pursue a path to the end to suffering, it can’t work in such a way as to guarantee absolute justice. If we insisted on a system of karma that did guarantee justice, the path to freedom from suffering would be closed.

This set of values, which gives preference to a free happiness over justice when there’s a conflict between the two, doesn’t sit very well with many Western Buddhists. “Isn’t justice a larger and nobler goal than happiness?” we ask.

The short answer to this question relates to the Buddha’s compassion: seeing that we’ve all done wrong in the past, his compassion extended to wrongdoers as well as to those who’ve been wronged. For this reason, he taught the way to freedom from suffering regardless of whether that suffering was “deserved” or not.

For the long answer, though, we have to turn and look at ourselves.

Many of us educated in the West, even if we’ve rejected the monotheism that shaped our culture, tend to hold to the idea that there are objective standards of justice to which everyone should conform. When distressed over the unfair state of society, we often express our views for righting wrongs not as suggestions of wise courses of action but as objective standards as to how everyone is duty bound to act.

We tend to forget, though, that the very idea that those standards could be objective and universally binding makes sense only in the context of a monotheistic worldview: one in which the universe was created at a specific point in time—say, by Abraham’s God or by Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover—with a specific purpose. In other words, we maintain the idea of objective justice even though we’ve abandoned the worldview that underpins the idea and makes it valid.

For example, retributive justice—the justice that seeks to right old wrongs by punishing the first wrongdoer and/or those who responded excessively to the first wrong—demands a background story beginning at a specific point in time so that we can determine who threw the first stone and tally up the score of who did what after that first provocation. Because it’s so easy to disagree on when stories like this begin, even in a monotheistic universe, efforts to impose this sort of justice often incite more conflict than they resolve.

Restorative justice—the justice that seeks to return situations to their proper state before the first stone was thrown—requires not only a specific beginning point but also that the beginning point be a good place to return to. Here we run into the problem that even monotheists get into conflicts over what that good place would be.

Distributive justice—the justice that seeks to determine who should have what, and how resources and opportunities should be redistributed from those who have them to those who should have them—requires a common source, above and beyond individuals, from which all things flow and that establishes the purposes those things should serve. And here, again, it’s impossible to get everyone to agree on what that source would be, and what purposes it has in mind.

We’ve all been oppressors and oppressed, over and over again.

The Buddha taught us to live in the wilderness. The proper way, when a monk goes into the wilderness, is to stay in a quiet place; to wander in the quiet wilderness; not to be entangled with friends and companions and other sorts of things. That’s the right way to do it. But most of us don’t follow the right way. We live in a quiet place and get attached to the quiet. As soon as we see a form, it gives rise to defilement. In our ears there’s nothing but defilement. That’s going too far. It lacks discernment.

Make the mind know the dhamma. When it knows the dhamma, make it see the dhamma. Practice the dhamma so that the mind is dhamma. The strategies you’ll need will grow from within the mind. Whoever has discernment gains intuitive knowledge. Whoever has intuitive knowledge gains discernment. That’s the way it is.

I once read in a Jataka tale about our Buddha when he was still a bodhisattva. He was like you: he had ordained and encountered a lot of difficulties, but when he thought of disrobing, he was ashamed of what other people would think—that he had ordained all these years and yet still wanted to disrobe. Still, things didn’t go the way he wanted, so he thought he’d leave. As he was about to leave, he came across a squirrel whose baby had been blown into the ocean by the wind. He saw the squirrel running down to the water and then back up again. He didn’t know what it was doing. It ran down to the water and stuck its tail in the water, and then ran up to the beach and shook out its tail. Then it ran down and stuck its tail in the water again. So he asked the squirrel, “What are you doing?”

“Oh, my baby has fallen into the water. I miss it, and I want to fetch it out.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I’m going to use my tail to bail water out of the ocean until it’s dry so that I can fetch my baby out.”

“Oh, no. When will the ocean ever go dry?”

“That’s not the issue. This is the way it is with practice. You keep bailing out the water, bailing out the water, and don’t care whether it ever goes dry. When you’re going to be a Buddha, you can’t abandon your efforts.”

When the bodhisattva heard this, it flashed in his heart. He got up and pushed through with his efforts. He didn’t retreat. That’s how he became the Buddha.

It’s the same with us. Wherever things aren’t going well, that’s where they will go well. You make them happen where they aren’t yet happening. Wherever you’re deluded, that’s where knowledge will arise. If you don’t believe me, spit right here. That’ll make it dirty. But when you wipe it away, it’ll be clean right here—right where it’s dirty.

This is the practice. You contemplate right where you’re deluded so that you’ll know right there. Any other issue is just duck shit and chicken shit. You don’t have to go groping after it. That’s how you have to take things on in meditation.

But actually, it’s not a matter of taking. You take them on by abandoning them. This is how the suppositions of language have things all backwards. You let things go. You practice letting go.

Wherever you’re deluded, that’s where knowledge will arise.

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Make Your Practice a Continuous Stream

A lesson in disenchantment from one of the Thai Forest Tradition’s most influential teachers
By Ajahn Chah, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Part 2 of 3

Things that are inconstant: the Buddha taught that they’re the truth. If you see that there’s no truth to things, that’s the truth. That’s constant. When there’s birth, there has to be aging, illness, and death. That’s something constant and for sure.

How is it constant? It’s constant in that that’s the way things keep on being. Even if you try to get in the way, you don’t have an effect. Things just keep on being that way. They arise and then they disband, disband and then arise. That’s the way it is with inconstancy. That’s how it becomes the truth. The Buddha and his noble disciples awakened because of inconstant things.

If you see that there’s no truth to things, that’s the truth. That’s constant.

When you see inconstancy, the result is nibbida. Disenchantment isn’t disgust, you know. If you feel disgust, that’s wrong, the wrong kind of disenchantment. The Buddha’s disenchantment is something else: leaving things alone, putting them down. You don’t kill them, you don’t beat them, you don’t punish them, you’re not nice to them. You just put them down. Everything.

The problems that we get involved with and cling to will gradually unravel. As the Buddha said, see simply that things arise and then disband, disband and then arise, arise and then disband. Keep watching this dhamma constantly, doing it constantly, developing it constantly, cultivating it constantly, and you’ll arrive at a sense of disenchantment. Disenchanted with what? Disenchanted with everything of every sort.

The things that come by way of the ears, we already understand them; by way of the eyes, we already understand them; by way of the nose, we already understand them; by way of the tongue, we already understand them. The things that arise in the mind, we already understand them. They’re all the same sort of thing—all of them, the same sort of thing: eko dhammo, one dhamma. This dhamma is inconstant, stressful, and not-self. You shouldn’t cling to anything at all. That way, disenchantment will arise. If the mind is peaceful and you feel, “Ah, it’s nice and peaceful,” the peace doesn’t matter either. Peace is inconstant too. There’s nothing but things that are inconstant. You can sit and watch the dhamma right there.

For this reason, if we gather things together as eko dhammo—one single dhamma—and see that their characteristics are all the same, it gives rise to disenchantment. This disenchantment isn’t disgust. The mind simply loosens its grip, it’s had enough, it’s empty, it’s sobered up. There’s no love, no hatred, no fixating on anything. If you have things, OK. If you don’t, it’s still OK. You’re at ease. At peace.

Nibbanam paramam sukham

Nibbanam paramam suññam

Nibbana is the ultimate happiness. Nibbana is the ultimate peace, emptiness. Listen carefully. Worldly happiness isn’t the ultimate happiness. Worldly emptiness isn’t the ultimate emptiness. The ultimate emptiness is empty of clinging. The ultimate happiness is peace. There’s peace and then there’s emptiness, the ultimate emptiness. At the moment, though, the mind is at peace, but it’s not ultimate. It’s happy, but it’s not ultimate.

This is why the Buddha described nibbana as the ultimate emptiness, its happiness as the ultimate happiness. It changes the nature of happiness to be at peace. It’s happy but not fixated on any object. The objects we like and don’t like are equal to each other.

The reason we live in physical seclusion (kaya-viveka) is to get the mind in mental seclusion (citta-viveka) from the objects that stir up its moods. These things are synonyms that follow one after the other. Upadhi-viveka refers to seclusion from our defilements: when we know what’s what, we can pull out of them; we pull out from whatever state the mind is in.

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The Blessed One's City of Dhamma : From the Milindapañha
by I.B. Horner

This booklet contains chapter 5 of The Questions of King Milinda: An Abridgement of the Milindapañha, edited by N.K.G. Mendis. This work is based on existing translations of the Pali original, primarily upon the rendition by I.B. Horner, published in the Sacred Books of the Buddhists series by the Pali Text Society.

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DYING TO LIVE
The Role of Kamma in Dying and Rebirth
By Aggacitta Bhikkhu

DIFFERENT PEOPLE HAVE different views and beliefs about what happens after death. Although all Buddhist Schools are unanimous that death marks the end and beginning of life for sentient beings still bound to saüsàra [the round of births], not all share the same views, observations and interpretations with regard to the actual process of dying and rebirth.

Tibetan (Vajrayàna) and Chinese (Mahàyàna) Buddhists believe that after death, the spirit of the dead person passes through an intermediate period (bardo in Tibetan, zhong yin in Mandarin)—which may last for as long as forty-nine days—during which it undergoes a series of unearthly, extraordinary experiences, including a “small death” at the end of each week, before it is finally reborn into another realm of existence. In contrast, orthodox Theravada Buddhism, which is the earliest, most authentic, extant record of Gotama Buddha’s teaching, asserts that rebirth takes place immediately after death.

It may not be too naive to suggest that this difference between the schools could be more apparent than real; for if one regarded the entity in the bardo/zhong yin as another reborn being, then this doctrinal inconsistency could very well be reconciled, although Theravadins may still question the weekly “small deaths” and forty-nine day duration. But it is not within the scope of this booklet to speculate on the rationale and credibility of this belief. Rather, the purpose of this work is to present a comprehensive picture of kamma and the often unpredictable role it plays in the process of dying and rebirth according to orthodox Theravada doctrine.

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You have to realize that some things are minor, some things are major. Your ability to make things minor—in other words, to see a setback as not such a big deal—is an important mental skill.

Patience is a skill in learning how to talk to yourself, learning how to give yourself encouragement, to remind yourself that what you’re experiencing right now is a combination of past habits and present habits, present actions. The past habits may be very strong, but they’re not consistently strong. And because they’re past karma, they’re going to wear out someday. But you can speed up the process a bit by being as skillful as you can in your breathing, in how you talk to yourself, and the perceptions you hold in mind: those three fabrications.

Keeping the image of farming in mind, of plants growing, is one useful perception to help with the process and relax the mind into a more patient observer. As for times when skillful qualities might even get in the way, a lot of that problem is impatience. As my teacher, the Thai Buddhist monk Ajaan Fuang, used to say, there are two types of people who come to meditation: those who don’t think enough and those who think too much. Those who don’t think enough don’t have much trouble getting the mind to settle down. But once they settle down, they don’t know what to do with it and they like to stay right there. Those who think too much like to think, and are proud of their thinking, or are entertained by their thinking. Those are the ones who have to learn how to be quiet and let the mind grow at its own pace.

With each little step in the right direction, you learn to encourage yourself. Appreciate it. Each step in the wrong direction, you tell yourself, “This is just a temporary setback.”

Again, it’s like a tree or a plant that you’ve planted in a field. You tend to it, but the plant’s going to do the growing. If you want to get everything well figured out ahead of time, what you get is what Ajaan Lee calls vipassana-sanna: ideas about the insight but not the genuine thing.

As the Buddha said, if you’re good at insight but weak in tranquility, you’ve got to work on the tranquility. Figure out how to get the mind to settle down, how to get it to enjoy staying here.

Part of that has to do with talking to yourself about it. The other part has to do with learning how to talk to your impatience. We’re so used to living with computers that move their ones and zeros around at incredible speed. But the mind isn’t composed of ones and zeros. It’s organic. Again, think of the tree, especially a large tree. It has many different branches to grow. They have to nourish many fruits. So it’s going to take time.

Here again, learn how to talk to yourself. Remind yourself that there are a lot of things you can’t figure out ahead of time, so you’re going to learn as you feel your way. As you get a better intuitive sense of what’s going on, then you can know where to push, where not to push.

The farmer knows not to pull the plant up out of the ground, but the farmer also knows when to water, when to add fertilizer, when to weed, when to be quick in harvesting, and when to wait. Even though the work may be repetitive, have confidence that the results are going to be good. Remind yourself, if you don’t train your mind—and part of training the mind is getting it to be still—it’s just going to go back to its old habits. You’re going to learn something new, to create something new, grow something new.

Dhammapada Verse 215
Anitthigandhakumara Vatthu

Kamato jayati soko
kamato jayati bhayam
kamato vippamuttassa
natthi soko kuto bhayam.

Verse 215: Lust begets sorrow, lust begets fear. For him who is free from lust there is no sorrow; how can there be fear for him?

The Story of Anitthigandha Kumara

While residing at the Jetavana monastery, the Buddha uttered Verse (215) of this book, with reference to a youth, named Anitthigandha.

Anitthigandha lived in Savatthi. He was to marry a beautiful young girl from the city of Sagala, in the country of the Maddas. As the bride was coming from her home to Savatthi, she became ill and died on the way. When the bridegroom learned about the tragic death of his bride he was brokenhearted.

At this juncture, the Buddha knowing that time was ripe for the young man to attain Sotapatti Fruition went to his house. The parents of the young man offered alms-food to the Buddha. After the meal, the Buddha asked his parents to bring the young man to his presence. When he came, the Buddha asked him why he was in such pain and distress and the young man related the whole story of the tragic death of his young bride. Then the Buddha said to him, "O Anitthigandha! Lust begets sorrow; it is due to lust for things and lust for sensual pleasures that sorrow and fear arise."

Then the Buddha spoke in verse as follows:
Verse 215: Lust begets sorrow, lust begets fear. For him who is free from lust there is no sorrow; how can there be fear for him?

At the end of the discourse Anitthigandha attained Sotapatti Fruition.

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