An Atheist Explores the Dhammapda Part 22: Local Woman Achieves Nibbana With This One Weird Trick (Miscellaneous/Pakinnakavagga)

Dhammapada Part Twenty One: Miscellaneous  (Pakinnakavagga)

Local Woman Achieves Nibbana With This One Weird Trick

“If by renouncing a lesser happiness one may realize a greater happiness, let the wise man renounce the lesser, having regard for the greater.”

Welcome to the next instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Dhammapada).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the Dhammapada, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post https://bit.ly/3IbwtwE

For the online Dhammapada that I use, see here https://bit.ly/3IgCiJr

And now:

Dhammapada Part Twenty One: Miscellaneous  (Pakinnakavagga)

You’ve got to love a good “miscellaneous” category, and what we get here are a collection of verses each with little gems of wisdom in them, with some clustered together into the by-now familiar mantra-like repeated motifs. It’s like a little listicle – “Ten Habits of Successful Buddhists”, or even, if we’re going with the clickbait title, “Local Woman Achieves Nibbana With This One Weird Trick”, or “Must Watch: Meditating Monk DESTROYS Mara”.

That aside, what do we learn? Well, there’s the slightly utilitarian concept of the first verse, quoted above, about aiming for the greatest happiness. Which, on a trivial basis is the same theory as eschewing the temporary pleasure of eating that doughnut now, for the greater pleasure of not getting obesity and type 2 diabetes later in life.

Next we learn that “Entangled by the bonds of hate, he who seeks his own happiness by inflicting pain on others, is never delivered from hatred”. Which, again, seems pretty uncontroversial. I don’t know if that would strictly be true for somebody with psychopathy, since because they’d lack the functionality of experiencing negative feelings for hurting another, in fact they would enjoy untempered enjoyment from hurting others. But for people who are neurotypical but psychologically damaged, yes, no amount of inflicting suffering on others serves to remove one’s own suffering.

And the last in this section of bon mots, is “The cankers only increase for those who are arrogant and heedless, who leave undone what should be done and do what should not be done”. And here I’m (sadly) reminded of Jordan Peterson and his silly “tidy your room” schtick. Because, as pat as his advice is, to be honest, he has a point. As one prone to procrastination myself, putting things off definitely falls under the category of things discussed in verse one – exchanging a lesser happiness (of not doing an onerous task now) for a greater one (or, rather, a greater suffering, where the list of things undone builds up and causes a lot of stress).

Next up is a little couplet of odd metaphors – “Having slain mother (craving), father (self-conceit), two warrior-kings (eternalism and nihilism), and destroyed a country (sense organs and sense objects) together with its treasurer (attachment and lust), ungrieving goes the holy man” followed by “Having slain mother, father, two brahman kings (two extreme views), and a tiger as the fifth (the five mental hindrances), ungrieving goes the holy man”. I wonder if there’s some pun in the Pali here concerning why these hindrances are described as parents, kings, tigers etc? There’s no explanatory commentary for this section, whereas sometimes there is (the stuff about trees and undergrowth last chapter, for example, involve some kind of double-meaning in the Pali words). Anyway, it’s an interesting image, which makes me think of a chess-like game.

The miscellany then takes up the refrain that I alluded to at the beginning, with six verses that all follow the pattern “Those disciples of Gotama ever awaken happily who day and night constantly practice….”. The constant practices are the Recollection of the Qualities of the Buddha, the Recollection of the Qualities of the Dhamma, the Recollection of the Qualities of the Sangha, Mindfulness of the Body, non-violence and meditation. It would, perhaps, be useful here to have a reminder of what the qualities of the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha are, because (ironically), I can’t recollect them.

The last section deals with the external attributes of the virtuous, after a little reminder about the causes of suffering. “Difficult is life as a monk; difficult is it to delight therein. Also difficult and sorrowful is the household life. Suffering comes from association with unequals; suffering comes from wandering in samsara. Therefore, be not an aimless wanderer, be not a pursuer of suffering”.

The virtuous man shines with a light than can be seen “from afar, like the Himalaya mountains”. He “is respected everywhere, in whatever land he travels”. And finally “He who sits alone, sleeps alone, and walks alone, who is strenuous and subdues himself alone, will find delight in the solitude of the forest”. It’s a strange concept, this requirement for solitude. I’d read it perhaps as more like knowing how to be alone as well as how to be with people, and not to consider either state as better or worse than the other.