The Dhammapada

by Eknath Easwaran

In its broadest application, dharma expresses the central law of life, that all things and events are part of an indivisible whole.

Like the Buddha, the sages of the Upanishads did not find the world capricious. Nothing in it happens by chance – not because events are predestined, but because everything is connected by cause and effect. Thoughts are included in this view, for they both cause things to happen and are aroused by things that happen. What we think has consequences for the world around us, for it conditions how we act.

All these consequences – for others, for the world, and for ourselves – are our personal responsibility. Sooner or later, because of the unity of life, they will come back to us. Someone who is always angry, to take a simple example, is bound to provoke anger from others. More subtly, a man whose factory pollutes the environment will eventually have to breathe air and drink water which he has helped to poison. 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. Selfish actions, at odds with the rest of life, bring unfavorable karma and pain. 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.”

In this sense, the separate personality we identify ourselves with is something artificial. Einstein, speaking as a scientist, drew a similar conclusion in replying to a stranger who had asked for consolation on the death of his son: 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. This state is not the extinction of personality but its fulfillment, and it is not achieved after death but in the midst of life.

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 spirit of the Upanishads, and no one embodies it better than the Buddha.

Yet the Buddha brings to this spirit a genius all his own. The sages of the Upanishads sought to know, and their testaments sing with the joy of Self-realization. The Buddha sought to save, and the joy in his message is the joy of knowing that he has found a way for everyone, not just great sages, to put an end to sorrow. Meditation, once the sublime art of a very few, he offers to teach to all – not for some otherworldly goal, but as a way to happiness, health, and fulfillment in selfless service. 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,” the name India has always given to religion itself. Like an adventurer who pawns everything to discover some priceless jewel, he sought out India’s spiritual treasure and then gave it away to everyone who would take it, rich or poor, high caste or low, with a free hand; and for that reason he is loved today, twenty-five hundred years later, by perhaps one quarter of the earth’s people.

Siddhartha Gautama was born around 563 B.C., the son of a king called Shuddhodana who ruled the lands of the Shakya clan at the foot of the Himalayas, along what is today the border between India and Nepal. Though not monarch of an empire like the neighboring kings of Kosala and Maghada, Shuddhodana was well-to-do, and his capital, Kapilavastu, had prospered from its location near the trade routes into the Ganges valley. Apparently his power was not absolute, but shared with a voting assembly called the sangha – the same name the Buddha would later give to his monastic order, one of the earliest democratic institutions in the world.

Siddhartha was an extraordinarily gifted child, and we are told that he received the best education for kingship that the world of his day could offer. He excelled in sports and physical exploits combining strength with skill – particularly archery, in which he stood out among a people famous for their prowess with the bow. He had a quick, clear intellect matched by an exquisite tenderness, a rare combination which would stamp his later life. He showed both when as a youth he saw a bird shot down by the arrow of his cousin Devadatta. Siddhartha, already dimly aware of his bond to all living creatures, tenderly removed the arrow, then took the bird home and nursed it back to health.

At the age of seven or eight the prince went to the annual plowing festival, where his father ceremonially guided the bullocks in plowing the first furrow. It was a long, stressful day, and when the boy grew sleepy his family set him down to rest on a platform under a rose apple tree. When they returned, hours later, they found him seated upright in the same position as they had left him. Disturbed by the ceaseless toil of the bullocks and plowmen and the plight of the tiny creatures who lost their homes and lives in the plowing, Siddhartha had become absorbed in reflection on the transience of life. In this profound absorption he forgot himself and his surroundings completely, and a joy he had never known suffused his consciousness.

On attaining manhood, Siddhartha learned that a lovely cousin named Yashodhara would choose her husband from the princes and chieftains who vied for her hand in a contest of archery. Siddhartha showed up on the appointed day, supremely confident of his skill. One of the suitors hit the bull’s-eye, but Siddhartha stepped forward boldly and with one shot split his rival’s arrow down the middle. Yashodhara proved to be as loving as she was lovely, and in time the couple had a son named Rahula who combined the beauty and tender nature of them both. Siddhartha was twenty-nine. His future promised every fulfillment life could offer.

The innocent pleasures of his life seemed fragile, edged with the poignancy of something not quite real enough to hold on to. An awareness preoccupied him which most thoughtful people taste but seldom face: that life passes swiftly and leaves very little behind.

it is this awareness of death that brings life into clear focus.

Dazzled by the radiance of his personality, it is said, people gathered about him and asked, “Are you a god?” “No.” “Are you an angel?” “No.” “What are you then?” The Buddha smiled and answered simply, “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.

Suffering because life cannot satisfy selfish desire is like suffering because a banana tree will not bear mangoes.

“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 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 the reach even of the gods. Only through ceaseless effort can you reach the goal.

“This, brothers, is the path that I myself have followed. No other path so purifies the mind. Follow this path and conquer Mara; its end is the end of sorrow. But all the effort must be made by you. Buddhas only show the way.”

“Since the day you left,” Shuddhodana said, “she has mourned, but she has followed your way. When Channa brought back your robes and jewelry, she put aside her finery. You slept on the forest floor, so she gave up her bed for a mat. When she heard you were eating only once a day, she too resolved to eat only once a day.” The Buddha stooped down and raised her to her feet. “You have not yet heard a word of the dharma,” he said, “but in your love you have followed me without question for many lives. The time for tears is over. I will teach you the way that leads beyond sorrow, and the love you have shown to me will embrace the entire world.”

There is no need to take to the monastic life, he told them, in order to follow dharma. All the disciplines of the Eightfold Path, including meditation, can be followed by householders if they do their best to give up selfish attachment.

The Buddha’s penetrating insight attracted many intellectuals, one of whom, Malunkyaputra, grew more and more frustrated as the Buddha failed to settle certain basic metaphysical questions. Finally he went to the Buddha in exasperation and confronted him with the following list: “Blessed One, there are theories which you have left unexplained and set aside unanswered: Whether the world is eternal or not eternal; whether it is finite or infinite; whether the soul and body are the same or different; whether a person who has attained nirvana exists after death or does not, or whether perhaps he both exists and does not exist, or neither exists nor does not. The fact that the Blessed One has not explained these matters neither pleases me nor suits me. If the Blessed One will not explain this to me, I will give up spiritual disciplines and return to the life of a layman.” “Malunkyaputra,” the Buddha replied gently, “when you took to the spiritual life, did I ever promise you I would answer these questions?” Malunkyaputra was probably already sorry for his outburst, but it was too late. “No, Blessed One, you never did.” “Why do you think that is?” “Blessed One, I haven’t the slightest idea!” “Suppose, Malunkyaputra, that a man has been wounded by a poisoned arrow, and his friends and family are about to call a doctor. “Wait!” he says. “I will not let this arrow be removed until I have learned the caste of the man who shot me. I have to know how tall he is, what family he comes f...

Once, near the town of Shravasti, the Buddha was seated with his disciples when a woman named Krisha Gautami made her way through the crowd and knelt at his feet. Her tear-streaked face was wild with grief, and in the fold of her sari she carried a tiny child. “I’ve been to everyone,” she pleaded desperately, “but still my son will not move, will not breathe. Can’t you save him? Can’t the Blessed One work miracles?” “I can help you, sister,” the Buddha promised tenderly. “But first I will need a little mustard seed – and it must come from a house where no one has died.” Giddy with joy, Krisha Gautami raced back to the village and stopped at the very first house. The woman who met her was full of understanding. “Of course I will give you some mustard seed! How much does the Blessed One need to work his miracle?” “Just a little,” Krisha Gautami said. Then, remembering suddenly: “But it must come from a house where no one has died.” Her neighbor turned back with a smile of pity. “Little Gautami, you know how many have died here. Just last month I lost my grandfather.” Krisha Gautami lowered her eyes, ashamed. “I’m sorry. I’ll try next door.” But next door it was the same – and at the next house, and the next, and the house after that. Everyone wanted to help, but no one, even in the wealthiest homes, could meet that one simple condition. Death had come to all. Finally Krisha Gautami understood. She took her child to the cremation ground and returned to the Compassionate Buddh...

One of the greatest admirers of the Buddha was King Bimbisara of Magadha. When he heard that the Buddha was approaching his capital, he hung the city with festive decorations and lined the main street with thousands of lamps in ornate holders, kept lit to honor the Buddha when he passed by. In Bimbisara’s capital lived an old woman who loved the Buddha deeply. She longed to take her own clay lamp and join the crowds that would line the road when he passed. The lamp was broken, but she was too poor to buy a finer one of brass. She made a wick from the edge of her sari, and the corner shopkeeper, knowing she had no money, poured a little oil into her lamp. A stiff breeze had come up by the time she reached the street where the Buddha would pass, and the old woman knew there was not enough oil to last long. She did not light her lamp until the radiant figure of the Buddha came into view at the city gates. The wind rose, and King Bimbisara must have watched in agony as a sudden gust extinguished all his lamps. When the Buddha passed, only one light remained burning: a broken clay lamp which an old woman guarded with both hands. The Buddha stopped in front of her. As she knelt to receive his blessing, he turned to his disciples. “Take note of this woman! As long as spiritual disciplines are practiced with this kind of love and dedication, the light of the world will never go out.”

For my part, I know that the Order will not fail without my guidance. Why should I leave instructions? Be a refuge unto yourselves, Ananda. Be a lamp unto yourselves. Rely on yourselves and on nothing else. Hold fast to the dharma as your lamp, hold fast to the dharma as your refuge, and you shall surely reach nirvana, the highest good, the highest goal, if that is your deepest desire.”

“But, Ananda, you must know that I will never leave you. How can I go anywhere? This body is not me. Unlimited by the body, unlimited by the mind, a Buddha is infinite and measureless, like the vast ocean or the canopy of sky. I live in the dharma I have given you, Ananda, which is closer to you than your own heart, and the dharma will never die.”

Later that same day they arrived at Kusinara. There in a grove of sal trees the Buddha told Ananda to prepare him a bed, “for I am suffering, Ananda, and desire to lie down.” He stretched himself out in what is called the lion posture, lying on his right side with one hand supporting his head, as we can still see him represented in the statues and carvings that depict his last hours.

“Then I exhort you, brothers: remember, all things that come into being must pass away. Strive earnestly!” They were his last words. Entering into deep meditation, he passed into nirvana for the last time.

I roused unflinching determination, focused my attention, made my body calm and motionless and my mind concentrated and one-pointed. Standing apart from all selfish urges and all states of mind harmful to spiritual progress, I entered the first meditative state, where the mind, though not quite free from divided and diffuse thought, experiences lasting joy. By putting an end to divided and diffuse thought, with my mind stilled in one-pointed absorption, I entered the second meditative state quite free from any wave of thought, and experienced the lasting joy of the unitive state. As that joy became more intense and pure, I entered the third meditative state, becoming conscious in the very depths of the unconscious. Even my body was flooded with that joy of which the noble ones say, “They live in abiding joy who have stilled the mind and are fully awake.” Then, going beyond the duality of pleasure and pain and the whole field of memory-making forces in the mind, I dwelt at last in the fourth meditative state, utterly beyond the reach of thought, in that realm of complete purity which can be reached only through detachment and contemplation. This was my first successful breaking forth, like a chick breaking out of its shell. . . .

For a moment the Buddha draws aside the curtain of space and time and tells us what it is like to see into another dimension. When I read these words I remember listening to the far-off voice of Neil Armstrong that evening in 1969, telling us what it felt like to stand on the moon and look up at the earth floating in a sea of stars. The Buddha’s voice reaches us from no distance at all, yet from a place much more remote. He is at the center of consciousness, beyond the thinking apparatus itself. As in some science fiction story, he has slipped through a kind of black hole into a parallel universe and returned to tell the rest of us what lies outside the boundaries of the mind.

To capture this vision will require many metaphors. Like snapshots of the same scene from different angles, they will sometimes appear inconsistent. This should present no problem to the modern mind. We are used to physicists presenting us with exotic and conflicting models – phenomena described as both particles and waves, parallel futures where something both takes place and does not, universes that are finite but unbounded. The mathematics behind these models is the best that imagination can do. And we laymen are satisfied: we cannot check the mathematics, but we are quite content to get an intuitive sense of what such radical ideas mean. Let us give the Buddha the same credence. Beneath the simple verses of the Dhammapada he will show us a universe every bit as fascinating as Bohr’s or Einstein’s.

If thought is discontinuous, we want to ask, what is between two thoughts? The answer is, nothing. A thought is like a wave in consciousness; between two thoughts there is no movement in the mind at all. Consciousness itself is like a still lake, clear, calm, and full of joy.

Someone once asked the Buddha skeptically, “What have you gained through meditation?” The Buddha replied, “Nothing at all.” “Then, Blessed One, what good is it?” “Let me tell you what I lost through meditation: sickness, anger, depression, insecurity, the burden of old age, the fear of death. That is the good of meditation, which leads to nirvana.”

What draws one back from this sublime state? The separate personality is lost, yet we cannot say nothing remains. There is a kind of shadow which the Buddha wears, clothing him in humanity, yet it is so thin that the radiance of infinity transfigures him. Siddhartha dissolved in the fourth dhyana, and one called the Buddha returned from it; that is all we can say.

There have been mystics East and West who did not care to return, who let their bodies go rather than leave this blissful state. But the Buddha was not of this kind. He had been born for a purpose – not just to attain nirvana for himself, but to bring it to all – and he was not willing to leave until that purpose was fulfilled...

In physics, the realization that light is not continuous led to a new view of the world. Much in the Buddha’s worldview stems from a similar discovery about thought.

We have to be very careful of misunderstanding here, for the Buddha is not saying that the physical world is a figment of imagination. That would imply a “real” world to compare with, and this is the real world. We are not “making it up,” but neither are we misperceiving a reality “out there” where things are solid and individuals are separate. 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.

When Einstein talked about clocks slowing down in a powerful gravitational field, or when Heisenberg said we can determine either the momentum or the position of an electron but not both, most physicists felt a natural tendency to treat these as apparent aberrations, like the illusion that a stick bends when placed in a glass of water. It took decades for physicists to accept that there is no “real” universe, like the real stick, to refer to without an observer. Clocks really do slow down and electrons really are indeterminable; that is the way the universe actually is. Similarly, the Buddha would say, this universe we talk of is made of mind. There is no “real” world-in-itself apart from our perceiving it. This doesn’t make physical reality any less physical; it only reminds us that what we see in the world is shaped by the structure of consciousness.

You may remember Bohr’s principle of complementarity: to get a whole picture of light, we have to describe it as waves and as particles at the same time. Similarly, the Buddha would say, if we look at experience one way – in the ordinary waking state – we see physical reality; if we look at it another way, we see mind. In profound meditation, one goes beyond sensory appearance and eventually beyond the very structure of the phenomenal world: time, space, causality. Time stops; there is only the present moment. Then everything is pure energy, a sea of light.

We want to ask, “Matter and mind are different aspects of what ‘same thing’? It’s all very well to say ‘consciousness,’ but what does that mean?” Like most quantum physicists, however, the Buddha doesn’t try to explain further. The question doesn’t make sense. It can’t be answered without creating confusion and contradiction, and anyway it is unnecessary. When you ask a physicist what “ultimate reality” is like, he or she is likely to reply, “We can describe accurately, and that’s enough. The laws are the reality.” The Buddha does the same. He says, “This is the way the universe is. If you want to know more, go see for yourself.”

We have a story in India about two men, one high-minded and generous, the other very selfish, who were sent to foreign lands and asked to tell what kind of people they found there. The first reported that he found people basically good at heart, not very different from those at home. The second man felt envious hearing this, for in the place he visited everyone was selfish, scheming, and cruel. Both, of course, were describing the same land. “We see as we are,”

It follows that when we change ourselves, we have already begun to change the world. Heisenberg taught physicists that in subatomic realms, the observer affects the observation. The way we ask an experimental question determines the kind of answer we will get. In the Buddha’s universe this is true for all experience. If a hostile person learns to slow down his thinking enough to see how much of what provokes him is projected by his own mind, his world changes, and so does his behavior – which, in turn, changes the world for those around him. “Little by little,” the Buddha says, “we make ourselves good, as a bucket fills with water drop by drop.” Little by little, too, we change the world we live in. Even the grand earthshaking events of history have their origins in individual thought.

“Fly in the sky, burrow in the ground,” says the Buddha, “you cannot escape the consequences of your actions.” You can run, but you cannot hide.

As a subatomic particle seems to form out of states of energy and then dissolves into energy again, individual creatures come into physical existence and pass from it again and again in the ceaseless process called samsara, the flux of life.

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 emptiness of process means fullness of being.

Those who attain the island of nirvana can live thereafter in the sea of change without being swept away. They know what life is and know that there is something more. Lacking nothing, craving nothing, they stay in the world solely to help and serve. We cannot say they live without grief; it is their sensitiveness to the suffering of others that motivates their lives. But personal sorrow is gone. They live to give, and their capacity to go on giving is a source of joy so great that it cannot be measured against any sensation the world offers.

“Our life is shaped by our mind, for we become what we think.” That is the essence of the Buddha’s universe and the whole theme of the Dhammapada. If we can get hold of the thinking process, we can actually redo our personality, remake ourselves. Destructive ways of thinking can be rechanneled, constructive channels can be deepened, all through right effort and meditation.

To the Buddha, of course, training the mind meant meditation: the regular discipline of concentrating the mind and making it one-pointed at will. Even in the Dhammapada – that is, even for his lay followers – the Buddha emphasizes the practice of meditation above all else. But meditation is a terribly difficult discipline.

1 Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think.

2 Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Joy follows a pure thought like a shadow that never leaves.