The Dhammapada

by Eknath Easwaran

“There is a Third Truth, brothers. Any ailment that can be understood can be cured, and suffering that has a cause has also an end. When the fires of selfishness have been extinguished, when the mind is free of selfish desire, what remains is the state of wakefulness, of peace, of joy, of perfect health, called nirvana. “The Fourth Truth, brothers, is that selfishness can be extinguished by following an eightfold path: right understanding, right purpose, right speech, right conduct, right occupation, right effort, right attention, and right meditation. If dharma is a wheel, these eight are its spokes.

“Right understanding is seeing life as it is. In the midst of change, where is there a place to stand firm? Where is there anything to have and hold? To know that happiness cannot come from anything outside, and that all things that come into being have to pass away: this is right understanding, the beginning of wisdom. “Right purpose follows from right understanding. It means willing, desiring, and thinking that is in line with life as it is. As a flood sweeps away a slumbering village, death sweeps away those who are unprepared. Remembering this, order your life around learning to live: that ...

kindly, acting kindly, living not just for oneself but for the welfare of all. Do not earn your livelihood at the expense of life or connive at or support those who do harm to other creatures, such as butchers, soldiers, and makers of poison and weapons. All creatures love life; all creatures fear pain. Therefore treat all creatures as yourself, for the dharma of a human being is not to harm but to help. “The last three steps, brothers, deal with the mind. Everything depends on mind. Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draw it. Joy follows a pure thought like a shadow that never leaves. “Right effort is the constant endeavor to train oneself in thought, word, and action. As a gymnast trains the body, those who desire nirvana must train the mind. Hard it is to attain nirvana, beyond ...

“Right attention follows from right effort. It means keeping the mind where it should be. The wise train the mind to give complete attention to one thing at a time, here and now. Those who follow me must be always mindful, their thoughts focused on the dharma day and night. Whatever is positive, what benefits others, what conduces to kindness or peace of mind, those states o...

centered, what feeds malicious thoughts or stirs up the mind, those states of mind draw one downward; turn your attention away. “Hard it is to train the mind, which goes where it likes and does what it wants. An unruly mind suffers and causes suffering whatever it does. But a well-trained mind brings health and happiness. “Right meditation is the means of training the mind. As rain seeps through an ill-thatched hut, selfish passion will seep through an untrained mind. Train your mind through meditation. Selfish passions will not enter, and your mind will grow calm and kind. “This, brothers, is the path that I myself have followed. No ...

Western mystics call this “recollection,” a literal translation of what the Buddha calls “right attention.”

St. Teresa: attention returns from the outside world, she says, like bees returning to the hive, and gathers inside in intense activity to make honey. Sound, touch, and so on are still perceived, but they make very little impression, almost as if the senses have been disconnected.

in the unconscious, with the senses closed down, there are no landmarks that one can recognize.

The Buddha specifies two aspects of this: “divided thought,” the ordinary two-track mind, trying to keep attention on two things at once, and “diffuse thought,” the mind’s tendency to wander.

To descend through the personal unconscious, we need concentration that cannot be broken by any sensory attraction or emotional response – in a word, mastery over our senses

begin to see connections between personal problems and their deeper causes,

and with this comes the will to make changes in your life.

thought is not continuous. Instead of being a smooth, unbroken stream, the thinking process is more like the flow of action in a movie: only a series of stills, passing our eyes faster than we can perceive. This idea is one of the most abstract in

responses should not be automatic;

between two thoughts there is no movement in the mind at all.

When the thought-process has been slowed to a crawl in meditation, there comes a time when – without warning – the movie of the mind stops and you get a glimpse

right through the mind into deeper consciousness. This is called bodhi, and it comes like a blinding

glimpse of pure light accompanied by a...

what Zen Buddhists call ...

This point marks the threshold between the second and third dhyanas.

Like the outside world, personal identity is far away. You feel as if the wall between yourself and the rest of creation were paper-thin. If you are to go further, this wall has to fall. For on the opposite side lies the collective unconscious: not necessarily what Jung meant when he coined the term, but what the Buddha calls “storehouse consciousness,”

take off your individual personality and leave it on the shore.

we have to absorb whatever comes to us with kindness, calmness, courage, and compassion.

Then the past carries no guilt and no regrets. You

have learned what was to be learned.

Samsara, the ceaseless round of birth and death, has no beginning, but it has an end: nirvana.

In the Buddha’s universe a personal, separate self is an illusion, just as substance is an illusion to the atomic physicist.

Distinctions between an “outside world” and an “inner realm” of the mind are arbitrary. Everything in human experience takes place in one field of forces, which comprises both matter and mind. Thought and physical events act and react upon each other as naturally and inescapably as do matter and energy. But the basis of the natural world is not physical.

Like light, we can say, thought consists of quanta, discrete bursts of energy.

The Buddha referred to these thought-quanta as dharmas – not dharma in the sense of the underlying law of life, but in another sense meaning something like “a state of being.”

Buddha describes personality: a blend of five skandhas or “heaps” of ingredients like these piles of spices in their banana-leaf wrapper. These ingredients are rupa, form, vedana, sensation or feeling, samjna, perception, samskara, the forces or impulses of the mind, and vijnana, consciousness. Without

reference to an individual self or soul, the Buddha says that birth is the coming together of these aggregates; death is their breaking apart.

Samskaras are the key to character, but their root is deep below the level of conscious awareness. We

self is only imagined, superimposed on momentary, unconnected mental events.

What we see is simply not there.

everything is a dharma, a mental event.

We don’t really experience the world, he

we experience constructs in the mind made up of information f...

electrochemical impulses received by the brain. And of course this information covers only a narrow range of sensibility, limited to what

Everything in experience is mind. What we call “things” are objects in consciousness: not that they are imaginary, but their characteristics are mental constructions.

What the Buddha is telling us is precisely parallel to what the quantum physicists say: when we examine the

universe closely, it dissolves into discontinuity and a flux of fields of energy.

the seed contributes is information.

when its genes begin to be expressed, it pulls from the environment what is needed to make a plant of just a particular kind.

Death is only the temporary end of a temporary phenomenon.”

Instead of seeing our personality as it is – an impermanent process – we cling to what we want it to be, something real and separate and permanent. From this root ignorance arises trishna, the insistent craving for personal satisfaction.

trishna comes duhkha, the frustration and suffering that are the human condition.

whenever there is ignorance of life’s nature, suffering has to follow.

When the mind is stilled, the appearance of change and separateness vanishes and nirvana

remains. It is shunyata, emptiness, only in that there is literally nothing there: “no-thing.” But