The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 10
Talks given from 21/02/80 am to 04/03/80 am
English Discourse series
13 Chapters
Year published:
The original tape and book title was "The Book of the Books, Vols 1 - 6". Later reissued as twelve volumes under the present title.
The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 10
Chapter #1
Chapter title: Beyond happiness is bliss
21 February 1980 am in Buddha Hall
Archive code: 8002210
ShortTitle: DHAM1001
Audio: Yes
Video: No
Length: 0 mins
THIRTY-SIX STREAMS ARE RUSHING TOWARD YOU!
DESIRE AND PLEASURE AND LUST....
PLAY IN YOUR IMAGINATION WITH THEM
AND THEY WILL SWEEP YOU AWAY.
POWERFUL STREAMS!
THEY FLOW EVERYWHERE.
STRONG WINE!
IF YOU SEE IT SPRING UP,
TAKE CARE!
PULL IT OUT BY THE ROOTS.
PLEASURES FLOW EVERYWHERE.
YOU FLOAT UPON THEM
AND ARE CARRIED FROM LIFE TO LIFE.
LIKE A HUNTED HARE YOU RUN,
THE PURSUER OF DESIRE PURSUED,
HARRIED FROM LIFE TO LIFE.
O SEEKER!
GIVE UP DESIRE.
SHAKE OFF YOUR CHAINS.
YOU HAVE COME OUT OF THE HOLLOW
INTO THE CLEARING.
THE CLEARING IS EMPTY.
WHY DO YOU RUSH BACK INTO THE HOLLOW?
DESIRE IS A HOLLOW
AND PEOPLE SAY, "LOOK!
HE WAS FREE.
BUT NOW HE GIVES UP HIS FREEDOM."
Gautama the Buddha's whole religion can be reduced to a single word. That word is freedom. That is his essential message, his very fragrance. Nobody else has raised freedom so high. It is the ultimate value in Buddha's vision, the SUMMUM BONUM; there is nothing higher than that.
And it seems very fundamental to understand why Buddha emphasizes freedom so much. Neither God is emphasized nor heaven is emphasized nor love is emphasized, but only freedom. There is a reason for it: all that is valuable becomes possible only in the climate of freedom. Love also grows only in the soil of freedom; without freedom, love cannot grow. Without freedom, what grows in the name of love is nothing but lust. Without freedom there is no God. Without freedom what you think to be God is only your imagination, your fear, your greed. There is no heaven without freedom: freedom is heaven. And if you think there is some heaven without freedom, then that heaven has no worth, no reality. It is your fancy, it is your dream.
All great values of life grow in the climate of freedom; hence freedom is the most fundamental value and also the highest pinnacle. If you want to understand Buddha you will have to taste something of the freedom he is talking about.
His freedom is not of the outside. It is not social, it is not political, it is not economic. His freedom is spiritual. By "freedom" he means a state of consciousness unhindered by any desire, unchained to any desire, unimprisoned by any greed, by any lust for more. By "freedom" he means a consciousness without mind, a state of no-mind. It is utterly empty, because if there is something, that will hinder freedom; hence its utter emptiness.
This word 'emptiness' -- SHUNYATA -- has been very much misunderstood by people, because the word has a connotation of negativity. Whenever we hear the word 'empty' we think of something negative. In Buddha's language, emptiness is not negative; emptiness is absolutely positive, more positive than your so-called fullness, because emptiness is full of freedom; everything else has been removed. It is spacious; all boundaries have been dropped. It is unbounded -- and only in an unbounded space, freedom is possible. His emptiness is not ordinary emptiness; it is not only absence of something, it is a presence of something invisible.
For example, when you empty your room: as you remove the furniture and the paintings and the things inside, the room becomes empty on the one hand because there is no more any furniture, no more paintings, no more things, nothing is left inside; but on the other hand, something invisible starts filling it. That invisibleness is "roominess," spaciousness; the room becomes bigger. As you remove the things, the room is becoming bigger and bigger. When everything is removed, even the walls, then the room is as big as the whole sky.
That's the whole process of meditation: removing everything; removing yourself so totally that nothing is left behind -- not even you. In that utter silence is freedom. In this utter stillness grows the one-thousand-petaled lotus of freedom. And great fragrance is released: the fragrance of peace, compassion, love, bliss. Or if you want to choose the word 'God' you can choose it. It is not Buddha's word, but there is no harm in choosing it.
Meditate over these beautiful sutras:
THIRTY-SIX STREAMS ARE RUSHING TOWARD YOU!
"Thirty-six" is only a Buddhist metaphor; it stands for "many." Many streams are rushing towards you. Each moment you are surrounded by a thousand and one desires, and they are all pulling you in different directions. You are a victim and you are falling apart.
A young man entered an hotel. He saw a very beautiful woman sitting alone in the corner drinking coffee. She was so beautiful and so attractive, the young man could not resist the temptation. He went close to her and asked her, "Can I join you?"
The woman looked at him for a few seconds and said, "Do you think I am falling apart?"
But that's exactly the case: everybody is falling apart, even that woman. If I had been in the place of that young man I would have said, "Yes. You need to be glued together."
Everybody is falling apart. You are not one; you have become many many fragments, and all the fragments are going in different directions. That's why there is so much misery in your being, because when your parts, which are essentially your intrinsic parts, are being pulled in different directions you feel the pain of it. That's what misery is: the pain of falling into different directions simultaneously, rushing into different directions simultaneously. That is what creates craziness, insanity.
Buddha says: THIRTY-SIX STREAMS ARE RUSHING TOWARD YOU! Beware! Not only one but many streams are rushing toward you. And if you don't take care, if you are not alert, you will be possessed by them. If you remain unconscious, if you remain sleepy, you will be defeated by those streams. Those streams are not basically enemies to you. They are pure energy, and energy is always neutral. But when you are asleep those same streams are dangerous; when you are awake, those same streams become great creative energies for you. They are rushing towards buddhas too, but in the hand of a buddha, dust turns into gold. The touch of awareness is alchemical. In YOUR hands, even if by chance you come across gold, it turns into dust. You are so asleep, you impart your sleepiness to whatsoever comes to you.
Those thirty-six streams he is talking about are gifts of existence, gifts of great energy. It is coming from everywhere. Now, it depends on you whether you can transform those energies into a synthesis, whether you can transform those energies into an integrated whole, whether you can create an orchestra out of all those energies. Then you become a song, you create great music. Your life becomes a melody.
But if you cannot transform those energies, then you will be a victim and you will be divided into so many parts. You will lose all integrity. You will become a crowd; you will not be an individual anymore.
THIRTY-SIX STREAMS ARE RUSHING TOWARD YOU!
DESIRE AND PLEASURE AND LUST....
And so on, so forth. What is desire? Desire means greed for more. It is unfulfillable. It is impossible to fulfill the greed for more because that "more" has no limitation. "More" simply means an unlimited phenomenon. You have ten thousand rupees, you want one hundred thousand rupees. One day you get one hundred thousand rupees -- now you want more. You want more and more and more. Whatsoever you get, the distance between you and your goal will remain the same; it is never reduced, not even by a single inch.
That's why beggars are beggars, obviously, but emperors are also beggars. Both are still hankering for more. What is the difference? No difference as far as the quality of their consciousness is concerned. Of course, the beggar does not possess much and the emperor possesses much, but that is not the point. The distance between the beggar's possessions and what he wants and the emperor's possessions and what he wants is exactly the same. One is a poor beggar, the other is a rich beggar; that much difference you can make. But both are beggars all the same.
To be in the grip of "more" is to be really eccentric, off-center. If you can't see it then you are not intelligent at all. It is such a simple phenomenon that just a little intelligence is needed to see it. In your whole life you have been trying and it is not that you have always failed; it only LOOKS as if you have always failed. You have succeeded many times, but each time you succeed, your desire for more is projected again and you remain in the same position: miserable, unhappy, frustrated. If you DON'T get what you want, you will be frustrated; if you GET what you want, you will be frustrated. It seems frustration is the destiny, the absolute destiny, of the unconscious man.
A psychiatrist was going around a mental hospital. He saw one man beating himself, pulling his hair, looking very suicidal. He was kept in a cell -- he was dangerous. He asked the superintendent, "What happened to this man?"
The superintendent said, "He loved a woman, he loved her very much, but he could not get her. She married somebody else. Since then he has been in this state. He wants to commit suicide, he does not want to live. He says there is no meaning in life: 'My meaning was in that woman. If I could not get that woman, that means my life is finished!'"
Feeling sorry for the man -- he was young and beautiful -- they moved ahead. They saw another cell and another man was inside it, and he was even more ferocious, very murderous.
The psychiatrist asked, "What has happened to this man?"
The superintendent said, "This is the man who married that same woman! Since he has married her he wants to kill her, and if he cannot kill her then he wants to kill anybody instead, but he wants to kill and destroy. He wants to kill the whole world! That woman drove him mad."
One is mad because he could not get her, the other is mad because he COULD get her. This is the whole history of every human being, more or less. It may not be so extreme, so you don't see it, but the differences are only in degrees. The man in the grip of desire is bound to become insane.
And Buddha says: PLEASURE.... Pleasure means that you think the body is the only source of happiness. That is sheer stupidity. The body's pleasures are very momentary; they are not real pleasures. But everybody is caught in the net of the body. We are born as bodies, but we need not die as bodies. If we die as bodies, our whole life was a sheer wastage. You have to grow up.
And remember: growing old is not growing up. Everybody grows old, but very few people, very rare people grow up. One who really grows up becomes a buddha. Growing up means you start becoming alert about bodily pleasures -- that they are momentary and they can change into their opposite very easily.
For example, you love eating and you can go on eating too much. Then it becomes a pain. It was pleasure in the beginning, but there is a limit to that pleasure. It is said of Nero that he used to have four physicians always with him. Even when he was going into war those four physicians used to accompany him. When Nero would eat, their whole work was to help him to vomit so that he could eat again. He used to love eating so much that he would eat twenty times, twenty-five times per day. You will call him mad -- and he was mad.
Now, what is the pleasure of eating? Maybe just a little pleasure of taste.... On your tongue there are little buds which experience taste. They can be operated on very easily and then you will not feel anything at all. Then the whole pleasure of eating disappears. That's what happens when you are in fever: your buds become dull, insensitive, so you eat but you don't feel any taste. People are living for eating; there are very few people who eat to live. Millions are living only to eat.
Humanity can be divided into two types of mad people: one type is obsessed with food, another type is obsessed with sex. And there is a deep relation between the two. The person who is obsessed with sex will not bother much about food and the person who is repressive of sex will become obsessed with food.
Whenever a country is repressive of sex it becomes very obsessed with food. That's what has happened in this country: for centuries it has been repressive of sex. That's why Indians have been very inventive about food -- new sweets, thousands of sweets. The world is completely unaware of all those sweets! And their food is so spicy.... When a foreigner comes he cannot eat it; he cannot see how people can eat it. It is burning hot! Why so much spicy food? It is repression of sex! If your sex is not repressed you will not eat such spicy food.
Just the other day I received two letters, one from a Western sannyasin, Mudita. She says, "Beloved Master, listening to you I feel great joy, but then suddenly I become horny." She must have been brought up with Victorian ideas, with Victorian education -- outmoded thoughts.
And another letter has come from Rekha, an Indian sannyasin. She says, "Listening to you, suddenly I had a great desire to eat spicy food." Now, she is an Indian! An Indian woman cannot recognize even in herself that she is feeling horny -- that is impossible. The whole desire has to move towards spicy food. But both are the same, there is no difference.
Food and sex have one thing in common. Food is needed for the individual's survival; without food you will not survive. And sex is needed for the species' survival; without sex the species will disappear.
Another phenomenon: the person who is living a natural life will neither be obsessed with sex nor will be obsessed with food. He will not be obsessed at all. But religions don't allow that: you have to be obsessed with something or other. If you are not obsessed you will not go to the temples and the mosques and to the churches and to the synagogues. That is the very secret of their trade. This whole business of religion goes on and on with no sign of ever stopping, for the simple reason that YOU go on being obsessed with something or other.
The person who is obsessed with sex will be less selfish; the person who is obsessed with food will be more selfish, for the simple reason that food means YOUR survival and sex means survival of the species. It is better to be sexual and to be after sexual pleasures than to live just to eat.
This country has become very selfish for the simple reason that sex has been completely denied; BRAHMACHARYA -- celibacy -- has been propounded down the ages as one of the greatest values. And the ultimate result has been that everybody has become obsessed with food. Whenever people are obsessed with food they become selfish -- obviously, because they are no longer interested in the species.
Immanuel Kant, one of the great thinkers of the world, says: This to me is the fundamental criterion of all morality: that any principle, if followed, destroys humanity. It is immoral. Now, what will Immanuel Kant say about brahmacharya? If brahmacharya is followed by the whole humanity it will destroy humanity. It will be a suicidal phenomenon. According to Immanuel Kant, brahmacharya is immoral -- more immoral than stealing, more immoral than dishonesty, more immoral than breaking your promise, more immoral than anything.
And I agree with Immanuel Kant, rather than with the whole Indian tradition. The criterion is this: you should think what will be the result if the principle is followed by everybody. It will be suicidal -- it will be global suicide. There will be nobody left to be celibate anymore.
And the same is true about the so-called old escapist sannyas -- renunciation; that too is immoral. If everybody follows the escapist idea and drops out and escapes to the Himalayas, the whole humanity will die.
In fact, your so-called mahatmas and saints live because you are in the world and you go on supporting them. If you are not in the world -- if you are also in the Himalayas, following your saints and mahatmas -- they will be at a loss. Who will feed them? Who will support them? They will have to commit suicide with their followers -- and the Himalayas is a really beautiful site if you want to commit suicide, the best place in the world. If you could not live beautifully, at least you can die in a beautiful place. Your mahatmas are supported by the worldly people -- and still they go on condemning the world. It is an immoral act. Escapism is an immoral act.