Dhammapada Verse 226: Ever Awake

0:00Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada. Today we continue with verse 226, which reads as follows. Sada jagaramananam ohoratanusikinam nibhanam adhimuttanam atthangacanti asava Which means, for those who are always awake, training both day and night, for those intent on nibbana, the defilements of the mind come to an end. This verse was taught in response to a discussion between the Buddha and a slave woman named Puna. A servant woman or slave, I guess I'm not quite sure how you should translate it.

1:16I don't know that there were I guess there were slaves at that time. It was more of an indentured servitude, perhaps. There was definitely class problems and so on. Low-class people turned themselves over as servants. I don't know how it worked anyway. It wasn't a perfect society by any means. But this woman was assigned to a great amount of work. There was a festival perhaps, I don't know. She was assigned to grind up rice into flour or some sort of rice-based work.

2:06And so she had to work late into the night and it was tiresome. Late at night in Rajagaha, Rajagaha is a city that is surrounded by mountains. So late at night, while she was working, she looked over and she saw up on the mountain, Gijakuta, Vulture's Peak, lights traveling along the path up and down the mountains. And it was the monks after listening to the Buddha teach or listening to whoever was teaching that day, late at night, they would return back to their kuti or return back to their tent or tree perhaps that they were staying under.

2:59And they had a light go along the way. And she thought, but she didn't know this. And she thought to herself, wow, I wonder why they're up so late. And I'm up because I have all this work to do. Must be some sickness or something wrong. Must be something wrong. I wonder why they're up so late. And thought nothing more of it. And then in the morning, she got together some of the rice dust that was left over from her work. And took it up in her hand, poured some water over it, and made it into a rice patty.

3:41And put it in the stove, in the charcoal to heat it. and prepared her meal that way and then walked out of her place of residence and maybe was going to work, I don't know. And she met the Buddha. The Buddha was going on alms round and she thought to herself, I have this offering, I could give this to this monk who appears to be very much worth supporting. I could do that, and that would be a great thing for me to do, but there's no way he'd accept it.

4:21And the Buddha stopped and looked at her, and so she held out this coarse rice dust cake, really the worst food, lowest grade food you could You could make. And the Buddha held out his bowl. She put the food in his bowl and thought to herself, well, he's accepted it out of kindness to me. That's very kind of him to accept my offering. There's no way he's going to eat it. He'll give it to someone else. And so she followed along behind him. and watched and the Buddha went to a tree, stopped under the tree, sat down and started eating her rice cake.

5:04And so she went up to him and she sat down and waited for him to finish. And they got to talking and she remarked to him, she said, so I'm up late at night because of all the work and all the duress I'm under to get this work completed. What's up with you? There must be something wrong with the monks that they're up so late. And the Buddha said, well, it's true that you're up because of the stress that you're under, but my students, they are up all night because that's the work that they are doing.

5:53because they are intent upon freeing themselves from suffering. And we taught this verse. So I think what the story reminds us or teaches us, the lesson it has, it's in the juxtaposition between the worldly exertion and the way of life of a Buddhist meditator. It reminds us that meditation isn't just a hobby. I think a lot of Buddhists, of course, a lot of people who practice Buddhist meditation, never realize the potential for practicing day and night, training themselves not only as a hobby or as a sort of a side exercise, but truly as a way of life, as a way of exerting themselves.

7:05We think of meditation differently from work that we do or ambitions that we have, life goals and a life's work. It's rare to find someone who thinks of Buddhism or Buddhist meditation as a life work. And so the idea of staying awake all day and all night and doing something like meditating all day and all night seems crazy. I've suggested that to some people and they just thought it was the most crazy thing to suggest that one might stay up all night meditating.

7:45And yet we do stay up all night for other reasons. We'll stay up all night partying or studying, working. We'll even stay up all night suffering if we're an insomniac or if we have some grievance. People who have lost loved ones might stay up all night. So we stay up all night for all sorts of different reasons. We pull an all-nighter for our work. And so the idea that meditation practice, practice of Buddhism, training in the Buddhist teaching should be similar is an important idea that we should understand and appreciate.

8:36For those who are awake always, it really is an ideal practice. that we strive for in our practice to get to the point where we can be awake day and night, where we can be mindful. Of course, sleep is a way of resetting the mind. And if your mind is engaged in activities that sully it, that increase its stress and tension and wind it up, then sleep is a way of coming back to an ordinary and normal state and so it feels quite relieving and so we really like sleep.

9:22But for a meditator it's quite the opposite. Meditation is a means of unwinding, it's a means of untying, winding down the mind. And sleep actually winds it back up because all of our ordinary and familiar habits reassert themselves through dreams and just through the relaxed state of sleep. And so we find the progress we've gained is often reset. And so practicing day and night because of the nature of meditation is actually a better thing for the mind and for the body even than sleep.

10:03It can be. That's, I think, the lesson of the story, that we should treat meditation as something, as a life's work, something we have to put our whole heart in. If you really want to gain results, it's something you have to decide is going to be a part of your life, not just a hobby or not just an escape, but something that you take as a training. And so that's what the verse starts to teach. The verse has four parts. The first is in relation to being always awake.

10:43The second is in regards to the training, training day and night. So the Buddha taught three types of training, or three aspects, three parts to the training. The first one is sila, this means ethical behavior. The second is samadhi, which means focus or concentration. And the third is pañña, which means wisdom. And there's a sense that the first leads to the second, the second leads to the third, but also a sense that this is the three aspects of our training.

11:16When we train, when we practice mindfulness, we're training in all three. So sila, the first one, ethics, It refers, of course, to not breaking precepts, so we should always be keeping ethical precepts that we don't do this and we don't do that, not just sometimes, not just when it's convenient. I won't kill when it's convenient, but when there are mosquitoes, well, I'll take a break from that. You can't do that. Taking a break is, especially for ethics, it misses the point of ethics because it's not so much about the body as it is about what it does for your mind, it helps you focus.

12:01And if you're only ethical when it's convenient, you're not really ethical at all. You're not changing the mind in any appreciable degree. But when you are ethical, when you do guard the mind or guard the body and speech with the mind, then it does change. It does focus your mind because the avenues by which the mind would get lost and get sidetracked are shut off. And so it involves not just keeping precepts, but Also, guarding our behavior when you walk.

12:37Ethical walking means being with the walking, being objective as you walk. Ethical speaking means being present when you speak, being aware of what you're saying and being aware of the emotions. Guarding the mind as it approaches the physical door and the verbal door. The second training, samadhi, often is translated as concentration, but focus maybe makes more sense because it's about focusing. Not just focusing in, but also coming into focus. As you're more ethical, your mind will start to right itself.

13:22Samadhi has a meaning etymologically of balance, I think. It's like the word same. It's like a balance. When you're not uncentered or unfocused, when you get to the point where everything starts to settle. This is why tranquility meditation is such a useful base for practice because it settles the mind. But mindfulness and mindfulness of experience drives straight to the point because it straightens out our crookedness. It straightens out all the disruptions.

14:04It settles all of our disruptions, unties all the knots in the mind. Because normally when we experience, for example, pain or bad memories or loud noises, We react. We're tied to them. We're caught up by them. And this disturbs the mind. It unfocuses our mind. So as we become more mindful, our mind focuses and stabilizes. And that's necessary in order to see clearly, right? But just like with a camera, in order to see, you have to focus it just like a pool of water or a pot of water.

14:46If you stir it up or if it's boiling or something, you can't see until everything settles to the bottom. And once it settles, then you can see what's in. In tide pools, when the ocean tide comes in, it can get muddy, but then when it settles, then you can see. So when the mind is riled up, when the mind is disturbed, When the mind is caught up by all the emotions and attachments and reactions that are a part of our ordinary non-meditative life, we can't see anything clearly.

15:27And so just as the first leads to the second, the second leads to the third, which is paññā. Paññā meaning wisdom. And wisdom is, in Buddhism, Not very similar to what we normally think of as wisdom in non-meditative circles. When we talk about wisdom, we think of something intellectual. But wisdom really means becoming more familiar with reality. It's not about studying intellectually anything that we might call reality. It's about studying firsthand so that we become more familiar.

16:06What does that mean? It means becoming more familiar with pain because familiarity removes or at least reduces step by step our reactivity, something that is so familiar to us. It doesn't have the same power over us as something that we are constantly just reacting to, trying to avoid, shying away from. And so by focusing on pain, by focusing on the bad memories, by focusing on the sound that disturbs us, we become more familiar with it. We become more familiar with our reactions.

16:47And we're as a result able to see the reactions that are positive and beneficial and those that are unbeneficial. We're able to see firsthand what it is that's causing us stress and suffering. And as it becomes more familiar, we become wiser. It means we know more clearly, we understand more clearly the results of our behaviors, the results of our reactions. And so as a result, we change. Wisdom is about change, really. The process of acquiring wisdom is about abandoning all the wrong behaviors, all the misunderstandings, all the self-harming tendencies that we have.

17:40Aho ratanusikinam. Aho is day. Ratan is night. Aho ratanusikinam. This then refers to the goal. So when you say we train, we train. When you talk about meditation as a training, one of the biggest challenges to doing that is understanding why you might be doing that, right? We understand that we would party all night because of the pleasure, the excitement. We understand that we would study all night because of the grades that we might get, because of the eventual job that we might get.

18:28We work all night because of the money, the success, the results that we can see, tangible results. And often it's quite daunting or challenging for meditators to find reason to commit themselves to meditation, to see the benefits of the meditation. which is kind of curious because the benefits are very similar to any other type of training or work that you might undertake. They're very much related to the actual nature of the work. If you If you study all night, you know more about the subject.

19:20If you work in a factory all night, you get factory products. If you party all night, well, you get a hangover. But no, you also get the excitement and the pleasure. I think with meditation we often look too far. We think of results as being some spiritual, magical, mystical, high and airy-fairy, I don't know, like up in the sky, sort of like there'll be a big sign you've made it or something. When in fact meditation is just a training. Nibbana, when we talk about nibbana, it's often thought of as this very special thing that you would really just, you know, be like walking into a capital city or a kingdom or walking into heaven.

20:25It would be like arriving at the pearly gates of heaven or something. But nibbana is the result of training. When you train yourself, what happens? You become trained. When you see clearly, when you observe, when you cleanse the mind, clear off the lens of perception, you see more clearly. What do you get? You get clarity. So nibbana is more of a function of the mind than anything. Nibbana means release or freedom. It often literally means extinguishing.

21:10extinguishing, putting out the fires. So it's directly related to our observation and appreciation and cultivation of understanding of the fires. The fire is what the fires in the mind, the fire of greed, the fire of anger, the fire of delusion. Ibana is not some thing that we attain, something that we get to if we travel long and far. Because thinking of it that way, as a place that you might get to, the place has nothing to do with the journey, right?

21:49And so when we think like that, we have no idea that we're getting close to the journey, right? Close to the destination. When someone is driving a car, Suppose you're driving to a city. Until you get to the outskirts of the city, you don't know whether you're going the right way. And that's often, I think, how meditators feel, because they separate the journey from the destination. And it's not like that. When you lift weights, you're not trying to move the weight somewhere, so that by the end you look and you say, boy, those weights got all the way over there, or all the way up there.

22:22I kept lifting them until they got to heaven. Absolutely not. You lift the weights and lift the weights and you turn around and you say, they're still where they started. They haven't moved at all. It's kind of like that, which is absurd, of course, because you're not lifting weights to move them. You're lifting weights to strengthen the body. And likewise, you're lifting, you're cultivating, you're exerting the mind in order to strengthen it. and to polish and to cleanse it.

22:58When you clean the house, nothing magical happens. You just end up with a cleaner house. When you cleanse the mind, there's nothing magical that happens. Often meditators are excited by sights. They'll see bright lights or colors or pictures. Maybe they'll hear sounds. Maybe they'll feel bliss or rapture, and they'll think, well, maybe that's it. And none of those are it. What's it is a clarity of mind. The mind becomes more clear, sees things closer to as they really are.

23:32The understanding that the things that we cling to are not worth clinging to. That which we feel is permanent, stable, lasting, is actually not. So the letting go of the things that we cling to, that which we think of as satisfying, this will satisfy me, we find out it's not. And just the general realization that there's nothing worth, there's nothing satisfying. Those things that we crave are not actually going to satisfy us. There's no benefit in striving for them and craving for them.

24:10That the things that we think of as me and mine under my control are not me nor mine nor under my control. All of which leads us to let go. Leads us to free ourselves from our attachments, from our stress, from our suffering. So someone who trains and who realizes, who frees themselves They will be free from all defilements of the mind. That's really the goal. If you want to ask whether you've made progress, you just have to ask, how's your mind doing?

24:52Is your mind seeing more clearly? Try and get a sense of what it is that you're actually doing. When you say to yourself, pain, pain, what are you doing? And that might not be clear in the beginning, but it should be fairly clear as you go, that what you're doing is reminding yourself and you're cultivating this capacity to remember things as they are, to see pain as pain. In order to say pain, you have to know that it's pain, which we think, well, of course, I know it's pain, but you don't.

25:23We do for a second and then we're gone. When you say to yourself pain, you're cultivating the perspective, That pain is pain Rather than that's a problem I have to fix it What am I going to do? Take some medicine or get a massage or something So it's a change And it cultivates objectivity And a familiarity Because it brings you actually closer to the experience And keeps you with the experience So you ask yourself, what am I doing? What is it doing?

25:56And you see that that's what it's doing. Then you can only guess that without doubt, the results will be similar. Okay, I'm seeing things more clearly as they are. I'm becoming more familiar with things. I'm going to have a better perspective of things. And you can look there. You can see there. Am I less reactive towards these things? Am I more objective about my experience, more peaceful in my interactions with things? That's where you see results.

26:31Of course, the thrust of the verse and the story is that really the most likely way of attaining any real results is again to treat Buddhist practice as a life goal, not as a hobby, not as something you do when it's convenient, but something that you engage in day and night. For those who are always awake, So that's the Dhammapada for today. Thank you all for listening.