The Dhammapada

by Eknath Easwaran

“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.”

Ananda’s eyes shone with gratitude. He got up and opened the door, and there stood the two barefooted women waiting for their reply. “Ananda,” the Buddha laughed, “by all this, you have said and done just as I would have said and done.” Thus were ordained the first nuns of the Buddha’s order, and the two branches of the sangha became the world’s first monastic community.

Then he stopped, for the music brought memories he was afraid to awaken. “It has to be tuned just right to make music,” he said abruptly, handing the vina back to the Buddha. “Neither too tight nor too loose. Just right.” “Sona,” the Buddha replied, “it is the same for those who seek nirvana. Don’t let yourself be slack, but don’t stretch yourself to breaking either. The middle course, lying between too much and too little, is the way of my Eightfold Path.”

“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 from, where they live, what kind of wood his bow is made from, what fletcher made his arrows. When I know these things, you can proceed to take the arrow out and give me an antidote for its poison.” What would you think of such a man?” “He would be a fool, Blessed One,” replied Malunkyaputra shamefacedly. “His questions have nothing to do with getting the arrow out, and he would die before they were answered.” “Similarly, Malunkyaputra, I do not teach whether the world is eternal or not eternal; whether it is finite or infinite; whether the soul and the 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. I teach how to remove the arrow: the truth of suffering, its origin, its end, and the Noble Eightfold Path.”

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.”

When only the monks of the Order remained, the Buddha asked if anyone had a doubt or question about the Way. All were silent. The Buddha was satisfied. “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.

In the Vinaya Pitaka (III.4) the Buddha left a concise map of his journey to nirvana – a description of the course of his meditation that night, couched in the kind of language a brilliant clinician might use in the lecture hall. In Buddhism the stages of this journey are called the “four dhyanas,” from the Sanskrit word for meditation, which later passed into Japanese as zen.

When a lover of music listens to a concert, she is likely to close her eyes. If you call her name or touch her on the shoulder, she may not even notice. Attention has been withdrawn from her other senses and is concentrated in her hearing. The same thing happens as meditation deepens, except that attention is withdrawn from all the senses and turned inward. Western mystics call this “recollection,” a literal translation of what the Buddha calls “right attention.”

The Buddha calls this “swimming against the current”: the concerted, deliberate effort to dissolve self-interest in the desire to serve a larger whole, when eons of conditioning have programmed us to serve ourselves first. This is painful, but with the pain comes satisfaction in mastering some of the strongest urges in the human personality. When you sit for meditation you descend steadily, step by step, into the depths of the unconscious. The experience is very much like what deep-sea divers describe when they lower themselves into the black waters hundreds of feet down. The world of everyday experience seems as remote as the ocean’s surface, and you feel immense pressure in your head, as if you were immersed under the weight of a sea of consciousness. The thread of concentration is your lifeline then. If it breaks, you can lose your way in these dark depths.

Here all the mind’s attention – even what ordinarily goes to subconscious urges and preoccupations – is being absorbed in a single focus. This seemingly simple state comes spontaneously only to men and women of great genius, and it contains immense power. The rush of the thinking process has been slowed to a crawl, each moment of thought under control. The momentum of the mind has been gathered into great reserves of potential energy, as an object gathers when lifted against the pull of gravity.

I think it was Keynes who said that Newton had the capacity to hold a single problem in the focus of his mind for days, weeks, even years, until it was solved. That is just what is required at this depth in meditation.

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 flood of joy.

This point marks the threshold between the second and third dhyanas. Crossing this threshold is one of the most difficult challenges in the spiritual journey. You feel blocked by an impenetrable wall. Bodhi is a glimpse of the other side, as you get when you drop a quarter into the telescope near the Golden Gate Bridge and the shutter snaps open for a two-minute look at sea lions frolicking on the rocks. But these first experiences of bodhi are over in an instant, leaving you so eagerly frustrated that you are willing to do anything to get through. You feel your way along that wall from one end to the other looking for a break, and finally you realize that there isn’t any. And you just start chipping away. It requires the patience of someone trying to wear down the Himalayas with a piece of silk – and you feel you are making about as much progress.

Here are stored the seeds of our evolutionary heritage, the race-old instincts, drives, urges, and experiences of a primordial past. To dive into these dark waters and stay conscious, you have to take off your individual personality and leave it on the shore.

Paradoxically, this cannot be accomplished by any amount of will and drive associated with the individual self. It is not done just in meditation but during the day. Doing “good works” is not enough; the mental state is crucial. 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. All the momentum of the thinking process comes from the residue of karma. To clear our accounts, we have to absorb whatever comes to us with kindness, calmness, courage, and compassion. Karma is not really erased; its negative entries are balanced with positive ones in a flood of selfless service.

When the books of karma are almost closed, the Buddha says, you “come to that place where one grieves no more.” Then you see that the mistakes of your past and their karmic payback were part of a pattern of spiritual growth stretching over many lives. Once paid for, those mistakes are no longer yours. They are the life history of a person made up of thoughts, desires, and motives that are gone. The karma of those thoughts applied to the old person; it cannot stick to the new. Then the past carries no guilt and no regrets. You have learned what was to ...

This experience cannot last. Like a diver, you have to come up for air. But unity has left an indelible imprint. Never again will you believe yourself a separate creature, a finite physical entity that was born to die. You know firsthand that you are inseparable from the whole of creation, and you are charged by the power of this experience to serve all life.

Even this is not journey’s end. Like a traveler returning from another country, you remember clearly what you have seen in bodhi; yet during the day, the everyday world closes in around you again. Such is the power of the mind that the mundane soon seems real, and unity something far away. In the third dhyana the conditioned instincts of the mind are stilled but not destroyed. They remain like seeds, ready to sprout when you return to surface awareness. The experience of unity has to be repeated over and over until those seeds are burned out, so that they can never sprout again.

Your goal is to reach such a depth that even in dreams the awareness of unity remains unbroken. Then every corner of the mind is flooded with light. The partitions fall; consciousness is unified from surface to seabed. You are awake on the very floor of the unconscious, and life is a seamless whole. This is nirvana.

When you return to the surface of consciousness, you pick up the appearance of personality and slip it on again. But it is the personality of a new man, a new woman, purified of separateness and reborn in the love of all life.

Those who achieve this exalted state, the Buddha says simply, have done what has to be done. They have fulfilled the purpose of life. They may be born again, if they choose, in order to help others to attain the goal. But this is their choice, not a matter of compulsion. Therefore, the Buddha says, this body is their last. Samsara, the ceaseless round of birth and death, has ...

As a word, nirvana is negative. It means “to blow out,” as one would extinguish a fire, and the Buddha often describes it as putting out, cooling, or quenching the fires of self-will and selfish pa...

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.”

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.

As Einstein described matter and energy solely in terms of the geometry of space-time, the Buddha describes matter, energy, and mental events as the structure of a fabric we can call consciousness. His universe is a process in continuous change – a seething sea of primordial energy, of which the mind and the physical world are only different aspects.

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. 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.”

When the thinking process slows considerably, it is seen to be a series of such dharmas, each unconnected with those before or after. One dharma arises and subsides in a moment; then another arises to replace it, and it too dies away. Each moment is now, and it is the succession of such moments that creates the sense of time.

The Buddha would say these dharmas come from nowhere and they return to nowhere. Mind is a series of thought-moments as unconnected as the successive images of a movie. A movie screen does not really connect one moment’s image to the next, and similarly there is no substrate beneath the mind to connect thoughts. The mind is the thoughts, and only th...

Everyone would have been familiar with the village marketplace, where vendors spread their wares on mats for passersby to see. When someone wants spices for that night’s dinner, the spice-seller takes a banana leaf, doles out little heaps of coriander, ginger, and the like, wraps them up in the leaf, and ties the bundle with a banana string. 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.

For the Buddha, however, this physical identification is as ridiculous as mistaking the dinner spices for the leaf in which they are wrapped. The body is only a wrapper. Most of a person is mind, which is a blend every bit as particular as a physical body is. We identify a person by referring to his big hands, his dimple, her fingerprints, the mole on his left cheek. The Buddha would refer to a person’s mindprint: his big ego, her tender heart, her fondness for chocolate, his fear of being wrong.

But these characteristics are not fixed. The blend is subtly but constantly changing in response to what we think and experience, just as biologists say the physical body itself is constantly changing at the chemical level. The skandhas are not substances but processes, and the mind, in Buddhist terms, is a field of forces.

Samskaras are thought, speech, or behavior motivated by the desire to get some experience for oneself. We can think of samskaras as grooves of conditioning, compulsive desires. It is this skandha which prompts action – or, more accurately, which prompts karma, for “action” here includes thought.

It is this stream of consciousness that we identify with a self, because its experiences seem to have happened to a particular individual. But according to the Buddha, this self is only imagined, superimposed on momentary, unconnected mental events.

The opening verse of the Dhammapada takes us the next step: “Our life is shaped by our mind, for we become what we think.”

These simple lines are both the subtlest and the most practical in the Dhammapada. The words are too rich for any translation to convey their full meaning. Literally they say, “Mind is the forerunner of all dharmas. All follow the mind; all are made out of mind.”

The essential discontinuity in nature observed by quantum physicists follows naturally from the Buddha’s experience of the discontinuity of thought. So does the idea that time is discontinuous, which may find a place in physics also.

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 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.

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.”

My relationship with you is not with you as you see yourself, but with you as I see you: a waxworks creation in my mind. As a result, two people can share the same house and literally live in different worlds.

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,” and our foreign policy follows what we see.

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.

Much in the Buddha’s universe, in fact, can be understood as a generalization of physical laws to a larger sphere.

The law of karma, for example, which seems so exotic when mind and matter are relegated to different worlds, simply states that cause and effect apply universally and that the effect is of the nature of the cause.

Karma is stored in the mind. What we call personality is made up of karma, for it is the accumulation of everything we have done and said and thought. So karma follows wherever we go.

“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.

If we object that what he calls a “person” is not the same from one life to the next, he will ask, “Are you the same from one day to the next?” We think of ourselves as the same individual who went to school in Des Moines many years ago, but what is the basis for such a claim? Our desires, aspirations, and opinions may all have changed; even our bones are not the same. Yet, somehow, there is continuity. “I wasn’t the same then,” we object, “but that wasn’t a different person either.” The Buddha replies, “That is the relationship between you in this life and ‘you’ in a past life: you are not the same, but neither are you different. Death is only the temporary end of a temporary phenomenon.” To those who grasp this, death loses its fear. It is not the end, only a door into another room.

In the last hours before dawn, he focused his attention on how to break this chain of suffering once and for all. The first link, he saw, is ignorance. Instead of seeing life as a flux, we insist on seeing what we want it to be, a collection of things and experiences with the power to satisfy. 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. From trishna comes duhkha, the frustration and suffering that are the human condition. With our glimpse into the Buddha’s universe, it is clear why human grasping seemed to him so ignorant and blind. We are trying to get from life something that is not there – trying to find a real Clark Gable in a movie, trying to find some experience that will last. And what we are trying to hold on with isn’t there either. We want to gratify a process with a process. The ego cannot be satisfied, and the more we try, the more we suffer.

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.