The Dhammapada

by Eknath Easwaran

whose real drive, we might say, is not so much to know the unknown as to know the knower.

then, like friends who have run off to some exotic land,

breathless messages describing fantastic adventures,

rambling letters about a world beyond ordinary experience, urgent telegrams beg...

there is more to life than the everyday experience of our senses.

that it is our destiny as human beings to make this journey ourselves.

We are not cabin-dwellers, born to a life cramped and confined; we are meant to explore, to seek, to push the limits of our potential as human beings.

Dhammapada means something like “the path of dharma”

than the highest goal life can offer: Self-realization.

two subcurrents ran through the broad river of Vedic faith. One, followed by the vast majority of people, is the social religion of the Vedas, with brahmins in charge of preserving the ancient scriptures and presiding over a complex set of rituals. But another tradition, at least as ancient, teaches that beyond ritual and the mediation of priests, it is possible through the practice of spiritual disciplines to realize directly the divine ground of life.

graduates of these forest academies

Oral records of their discoveries began to be collected around 1000 B.C. or even earlier, in fragments called the Upanishads.

Each Upanishad contains the record of a darshana: literally something

seen, a view not of the world of everyday experience but of the deep, still realms beneath the sense-world, accessible in deep meditation:

Self-realization means health, vitality, long life, and a harmonious balance of inward and outward activity.

We are what our deep, driving desire is. As our deep, driving desire is, so is our will. As our will is, so is our deed. As our deed is, so is our destiny.

on knowing, not the learning of facts but the direct experience of truth: the one reality underlying life’s multiplicities.

The method these sages followed in their pursuit of truth was called brahmavidya, the “supreme science,” a discipline in which attention is focused intensely on the contents of consciousness.

discarded everything impermanent as ultimately unreal,

was neti, neti atma: “this is not the self; that is not the self.”

“I.” Yet when everything individual was stripped away, an intense awareness remained: consciousness itself. The sages called this ultimate ground of personality atman, the Self.

India’s scriptures are steeped in the conviction of an all-pervasive order (ritam) in the whole of creation that is reflected

in each part.

insight, Vedic India conceived of the natural world – not only physical phenomena but human action and thought – as uniformly governed by universal law.

This law is called dharma in Sanskrit, and the Buddha would make it the focus of his way of life. The word comes from dhri, which means to bear or to hold, and its root sense is the essence of a thing, the defining quality that “holds it together” as what it is. In its broadest application, dharma expresses the central law of life, that all things and events are part of an indivisible whole.

activity, dharma is behavior that is in harmony with this unity.

Sometimes it is justice, righteousness, or fairness; sometimes simply duty, the obligations of religion or society. It also means being true to what is essential in the human being: nobility, honor, forgiveness, truthfulness, loyalty, compassion. An ancient saying declares that ahimsa paramo dharma: the essence of dharma, the highest law of life, is to do no harm to any living creature.

These are illustrations of what Hinduism and Buddhism call the law of karma. Karma means something done, whether as cause or effect. Actions in harmony with dharma bring good karma and add to health and happiness.

In this view, no divine agency is needed to punish or reward us; we punish and reward ourselves. This was not regarded as a tenet of religion but as a law of nature, as universal as the law of gravity. No one has stated it more clearly than St. Paul: “As you sow, so shall you reap. With whatever measure you mete out to others, with the same measure it shall be meted out to you.”

Unpaid karmic debts and unfulfilled desires do not vanish when the physical body dies. They are forces which remain in the universe to quicken life again at the moment of conception when conditions are right for past karma to

be fulfilled. We live and act, and everything we do goes into what we think at the present moment, so that at death the mind is the sum of everything we have done and everything we still desire to do. That sum of forces has karma to reap, and when the right context comes – the right parents, the right society, the right epoch – the bundle of energy that is the germ of personality is born again.

ten. We go back eons, and some of the contents of the deepest unconscious are the dark drives of an evolutionary heritage much older than the human race.

Einstein,

A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

moksha, freedom from the delusion of separateness; yoga, complete integration of consciousness; nirvana, the extinction of the sense of a separate ego.

The sixth century B.C. was a time of creative spiritual upheaval

Confucius in China, Zoroaster in Persia, the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece,

and the later pro...

Is...

The encounter between India and Greece when Alexander the Great reached the Indus river, 326 B.C., invites comparison between

these two civilizations and gives us in the West a familiar benchmark. India, with its decimal system and the potent creation of zero, dominated mathematics as Greece did geometry, and in medicine and surgery both led the ancient world.

Many of these figures did not merely bypass religious orthodoxy but challenged it. We read of teachers and their disciples wandering about

debating each other and teaching a perplexing disarray of views. Some of their arguments – that good and bad conduct make no difference, for fate decides everything; that transcendental knowledge is impossible; that life is entirely material – are perennial and have their adherents even today.

born. Like Jesus, it may be said, he came not to destroy tradition but to fulfill its meaning.

And as Jesus rose out of the tradition of the prophets and yet transcends all traditions and breaks all molds, the Buddha, though he broke with the rituals and authority of the Vedas, stands squarely in the tradition of the Upanishads.

Vitality, a sublime self-confidence, an emphasis on direct experience in meditation without reference to any outside authority, and a passionate trust in truth, in the oneness of life, and in our human capacity to take our destiny into our own hands – all these are the very...

He argues with no one, denies no faith, convinces only with truth and love.

He brought not so much a new religion as sanatana dharma, “the eternal dharma,”

“I am awake” – the literal meaning of the word buddha, from the Sanskrit root budh, to wake up.

“The First Truth, brothers, is the fact of suffering. All desire happiness, sukha: what is good, pleasant, right, permanent, joyful, harmonious, satisfying, at ease. Yet all find that life brings duhkha, just the opposite: frustration, dissatisfaction, incompleteness, suffering, sorrow. Life is change, and change can never satisfy desire. Therefore everything that changes brings suffering. “The Second Truth is the cause of suffering. It is not life that brings sorrow, but the demands we make on life. The cause of duhkha is selfish desire: trishna, the thirst to have what one wants and to get one’s own way. Thinking life can make them happy by bringing what they want, people run after the satisfaction of their desires. But they get only unhappiness, because selfishness can only bring sorrow. “There is no fire like selfish desire, brothers. Not a hundred years of experience can extinguish it, for the more you feed it, the more it burns. It demands what experience cannot give: permanent pleasure unmixed with anything unpleasant. But there is no end to such desires; that is the nature of the mind. Suffering because life cannot satisfy selfish desire is like suffering because a banana tree will not bear mangoes.