The Dhammapada

by Eknath Easwaran

If the Upanishads are like slides, the Dhammapada seems more like a field guide.

And the third of these classics, the Bhagavad Gita, gives us a map and guidebook. It gives a systematic overview of the territory, shows various approaches to the summit with their benefits and pitfalls, offers recommendations, tells us what to pack and what to leave behind. More than either of the others, it gives the sense of a personal guide. It asks and answers the questions that you or I might ask – questions not about philosophy or mysticism, but about how to live effectively in a world of challenge and change.

if everything else were lost, we would need nothing more than the Dhammapada to follow the way of the Buddha.

the Dhammapada is a sure guide to nothing less than the highest goal life can offer: Self-realization.

the Rig Veda, whose oldest hymns go back at least to 1500 B.C.

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.

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. In practice this means meditation.

the sages of the Upanishads took a different track from conventional science. They looked not at the world outside, but at human knowledge of the world outside. They sought invariants in the contents of consciousness and discarded everything impermanent as ultimately unreal, in the way that the sensations of a dream are seen to be unreal when one awakens.

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

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.

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

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.

For the Upanishadic sages, however, the books of karma could only be cleared within the natural world. 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.

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.

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 in most of the major civilizations of antiquity. Within a hundred years on either side we have Confucius in China, Zoroaster in Persia, the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, and the later prophets of Israel.

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.

It is probably no coincidence that the Buddha, whose language is occasionally that of a physician, arose in a land with the world’s greatest medical schools.

the Buddha, though he broke with the rituals and authority of the Vedas, stands squarely in the tradition of the Upanishads.

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.

“Everything is change,” he thought; “each moment comes and goes. Is there nothing more, nothing to the future but decline and death?”

In a world of sleepwalkers, how many would listen to someone returning from a world they would probably never see, coming to say that love always begets love and violence only breeds more violence?

Everyone desires an end to suffering and sorrow. To those who will listen, I will teach the dharma, and for those who follow it, the dharma itself will set them free.”

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.

“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.

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 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.

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.

“Every human being has the capacity to overcome suffering.”

first meditative state, where the mind, though not quite free from divided and diffuse thought, experiences lasting joy.

second meditative state quite free from any wave of thought,

third meditative state, becoming conscious in the very depths of the unconscious.

fourth meditative state, utterly beyond the reach of thought,

Throughout the first dhyana the centrifugal force of the thinking process is gradually absorbed as attention is recalled.

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 and our likes and dislikes.

The concentration it requires will bring success in any field, along with a deep sense of well-being, security, and a quiet joy in living.

The thinking process is slowed until you can almost see each thought pass by, yet instead of one thought following another without rhyme or reason, the mind has such power that the focus of concentration is not disturbed.

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.

There must be no taint of “I” or “mine” in what you do, no self-interest, only your best effort to see yourself in all. One way to explain this is that karma has to be cleared before you can cross the wall.

Beyond this, words are useless. Time stops with the mind, and many physiological processes are almost suspended. But there is an intense, unbroken flood of joy to which even the body and nervous system respond.

In the third dhyana the conditioned instincts of the mind are stilled but not destroyed.

Each moment is now, and it is the succession of such moments that creates the sense of time.

The mind is the thoughts, and only the speed of thinking creates the illusion that there is something continuous and substantial.

That is how the 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.

The Sanskrit name for this is samskara, which means literally “that which is intensely done.”