Dhammapada

And, uh, yeah, I've not been at Dharma Night for some time, since pre-pandemic giving a talk, so, uh, it's great to, to be back, um, and meeting, meeting you all.

Um, and I'm gonna be talking, um, well, giving some reflections, sharing some reflections with you from this book, The Dhammapada.

And, um, the Dhammapada means, uh, the way of truth.

Dharma means truth.

Pada is footsteps or the way, the way of, path of.

He ac- actually had one of his, uh, well, his attendant, his main attendant, Ananda, was one of the people that would, had this prodigious memory, and, uh, every time the Buddha gave a teaching, Ananda would hear of it and would sort of remember it.

And eventually it was passed on, and several hundred years later, the teachings were written down.

And the Dhammapada is a collection of some of these teachings under particular themes.

Yeah, yeah.

I like the verse you mentioned first of all, the verse in the Dhammapada is a very nice verse.

Hatred never ends through hatred.

Hatred only ends through love.

This is an eternal law.

It's a very, very nice verse, and this is from the Dhammapada.

So the Dhammapada is not a nice collection to get.

If you want to read some nice Buddhist sayings, like you can have on your table next to you when you go to sleep or whatever, you want to kind of read one verse to inspire you, to make you sleep a little bit better, right? Dhammapada is always great.

He didn't use that phrasing.

But from my perspective, he understood the laws of energy the way that The Dhammapada says it not in the sky, not in the ocean, not in mountain canyons.

Is there a place anywhere in the world where a person can hide from his evil deeds? And the way Galatians says it, do not be deceived.

God is not mocked.

From craving arises fear.

For one who is freed from craving, there is no sorrow, whence fear." Dhammapada two sixteen.

"When a man lets go of all desires of the mind and is content in the self by the self, then he is said to be steady in wisdom." The Bhavavadagi-- Bhav-Bhavadagita two fifty-fifty-five.

"And we shall surely test you with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits.

It's like, you know, and it was really hard for me to pick myself up and go to class.

And I picked up the Dhammapada and it was a part on sharing the way I was like, okay, there it is.

Yeah.

Get your butt up, go to class and do it well, you know, and do your best doing it.

It doesn't penetrate being.

We sit in an armchair and we read the Tao Te Ching or the Beatitudes or the Bhagavad Gita or the Dhammapada and we say, yeah, right on.

That's how to live.

And we instantly violate it when we're out in the friction of life.

I've really enjoyed getting to know Bart over the past week, reading his book, which he didn't write actually.

This book is a compilation of the Yoga Sutras, the Dhammapada, the Heart Sutra, the Ashtavakra Gita, the Faith Mind Sutra, and the Tao Te Ching, or however you pronounce that.

in which Barth took numerous translations and compared them side by side in the light of his own experience and came up with the best translations he could.

And I hadn't read most of these, so that was really interesting.

[clears throat] He, um ...

There's a famous, uh, poem in this Dhammapada that, uh, uh, ends by this is the teachings, the teaching of the Buddhas.

It's in the plural, as if all Buddhas in time and space have this particular teaching.

And it says, um, "To avoid causing harm, to avoid, uh, being, um, doing what is, um, harmful or wicked or, or, um, or bad," [clears throat] harmful.