Dhammapada Reflections | Part Seven | Chapters Eleven & Twelve
CHAPTER 11
OLD AGE
11:1. When this world is ever ablaze, why this laughter, why this jubilation? Shrouded in darkness, will you not see the light?
11:2. Behold this body—a painted image, a mass of heaped-up sores, infirm, full of hankering—of which nothing is lasting or stable!
11:3. Fully worn out is this body, a nest of disease, and fragile. This foul mass breaks up, for death is the end of life.
11:4. These dove-colored bones are like gourds that lie scattered about in autumn. Having seen them, how can one seek delight?
11:5. This city, the body, is built of bones, plastered with flesh and blood; within are decay and death, pride and jealousy.
11:6. Even gorgeous royal chariots wear out, and indeed this body too wears out. But the Dhamma of the Good does not age; thus the Good make it known to the good.
11:7. The man of little learning grows old like a bull. He grows only in bulk, but his wisdom does not grow.
11:8. Through many a birth in samsara have I wandered in vain, seeking the builder of this house of life. Repeated birth is indeed suffering!
11:9. O house-builder, you are seen! You will not build this house again. For your rafters are broken and your ridgepole shattered. My mind has reached the Unconditioned; I have attained the destruction of craving.
11:10. Those who in youth have not led the holy life, or have failed to acquire wealth, languish like old cranes in the pond without fish.
11:11. Those who in youth have not led the holy life, or have failed to acquire wealth, lie sighing over the past, like worn-out arrows shot from a bow.
CHAPTER 12
THE SELF
12:1. If one holds oneself dear, one should diligently watch oneself. Let the wise man keep vigil during any of the three watches of the night.
12:2. One should first establish oneself in what is proper; then only should one instruct others. Thus the wise man will not be reproached.
12:3. One should do what one teaches others to do; if one would train others, one should be well controlled oneself. Difficult, indeed, is self-control.
12:4. One truly is the protector of oneself; who else could the protector be? With oneself fully controlled, one gains a mastery that is hard to gain.
12:5. The evil a witless man does by himself, born of himself and produced by himself, grinds him as a diamond grinds a hard gem.
12:6. Just as a single creeper strangles the tree on which it grows, even so, a man who is exceedingly depraved harms himself as only an enemy might wish.
12:7. Easy to do are things that are bad and harmful to oneself. But exceedingly difficult to do are things that are good and beneficial.
12:8. Whoever, on account of perverted views, scorns the Teaching of the Perfected Ones, the Noble and Righteous Ones—that fool, like the bamboo, produces fruits only for self-destruction.
12:9. By oneself is evil done; by oneself is one defiled. By oneself is evil left undone; by oneself is one made pure. Purity and impurity depend on oneself; no one can purify another.
12:10. Let one not neglect one’s own welfare for the sake of another, however great. Clearly understanding one’s own welfare, let one be intent upon the good.
SENSEI MICHAEL COMMENTARY
CHAPTERS XI-XII | OLD AGE & THE SELF
We are confronted with an inconvenient truth: the body is impermanent, and we do not want it to be. We spend enormous energy trying to establish something permanent out of what is inevitably going to decay. We identify with our youth, health, appearance, strength, personality, all the changing conditions through which this body moves, and then we are shocked when they change. We are beckoned to look directly: this body wears out, it becomes sick, ages, and dies. The problem is not the body; it is our own striving that creates suffering. Our True Nature is ever-living and always present, so this is where we should build.
The body is called a painted image, a city built of bones, flesh, and blood. Even the most beautiful royal chariot eventually falls apart. We do not need to turn this into disgust for embodiment. The body is wondrous precisely as this impermanent activity. It breathes, moves, touches, suffers, loves, ages, and disappears. We suffer when we demand that it become the foundation for something permanent. Conditions may age, and bodies and ideas may age, but the Dhamma does not age because the living truth of this moment is never old. The forms through which the Dharma is expressed change continually, but this immediate field does not become stale simply because another year has passed. We can grow old without growing wise if we spend our years accumulating experience without ever entering deeply into the life before us.
Then the Buddha speaks of wandering through many births searching for the builder of this house. The house-builder is craving, but craving is more than simply wanting pleasant things. It is the activity that keeps constructing an abode for the karmic self. We build with desire. We build with judgment. We build with certainty. We build with identity. Something happens and immediately we begin assembling rafters and walls: this is who I am, this is what I need, this is what must happen. Then comes the great declaration: “O house-builder, you are seen!” The house-builder has done its best work while remaining invisible. We mistake the house for reality and the one living inside it for our True Nature. Once the activity is seen, it can no longer operate with the same authority. We see the building happening.
Then the rafters break, and the ridgepole shatters. The striving small self loses its true abode. This does not mean that the created self disappears. Chapter twelve makes this especially clear. We still have a name. We still have responsibilities. We still have preferences, history, personality, roles, obligations, and relationships. The karmic self remains present. The mistake is not having one. The mistake is confusing it with what we truly are. We can use this created self skillfully. We need it to answer the phone, raise children, teach students, pay bills, mess up, apologize, make decisions, and engage the circumstances immediately before us. Practice does not require throwing the self away. It requires knowing where it belongs. The created self can become a vehicle through which wisdom responds to conditions rather than a house in which we barricade ourselves.
This is why we must watch ourselves, establish ourselves, control ourselves, protect ourselves. No one else can do our practice for us. If you do not practice, no one does. A teacher can point. A sangha can support us. A text can open a gate, but no one can inhabit this moment in our place. No one can take responsibility for the mind with which we meet what is here, and no one can relinquish our grasping for us.
This does not create some isolated practitioner sealed off from everyone else. Quite the opposite. If we see “other,” or if we see “outside,” that is our sickness. If someone before us is deluded, that delusion is not outside the field of our life. If conflict appears, it is here. If suffering appears, it is here. We cannot cut another person away from ourselves and call the problem solved. Amputation is not an option. The question becomes how we engage skillfully so that harmony can arise.
This makes the instruction to establish oneself before instructing others very important. We cannot bring harmony by reproducing the very division we claim to be correcting. If I approach another person from certainty, superiority, resentment, or self-righteousness, I have already reinforced the sickness. The Dharma has to be alive in us first. This is the same flower that must have fragrance, the same tongue that must actually taste the soup. Teaching that has not entered our own life remains an image of Dharma rather than Dharma functioning.
The Dhammapada tells us that the harmful acts of the foolish person arise from himself and eventually grind him down. The image of the creeper is powerful: the vine grows upon the tree and eventually strangles the very thing supporting it. This is what karmic construction can do. We build the self to protect us, then spend our lives protecting the self we built. We construct certainty to make ourselves secure, then become imprisoned by the certainty. We build identities to orient ourselves, then suffer whenever reality fails to conform to them. The shelter becomes the strangling vine.
This is why harmful actions are often easy. They follow grooves that have already been worn deeply into us. Resentment and fear know the road because they created it. Wisdom requires something more difficult: it requires seeing. The Dhammapada warns against perverted views because manufactured knowledge can become a surrogate for direct wisdom. The moment a view becomes more important than the living reality before us, we have built another wall in the house. Awakening does not mean having the correct set of beliefs. It means seeing the construction as construction.
“By oneself is evil done; by oneself is one defiled. By oneself is evil left undone; by oneself is one made pure.” We should not hear this as isolation. Every act touches all space and time. Nothing we do belongs to us alone. Yet responsibility cannot be outsourced. We cannot ask another person to practice in our place, and we cannot make another person responsible for the condition of our mind. Purification does not mean making reality pure. Reality is already pure before judgment divides it. Purification is ceasing the activity that obscures what is already here.
The final verse tells us not to neglect our own welfare for the sake of another. This can sound selfish if we imagine ourselves as separate beings competing for care. But if nothing is outside, abandoning our own practice cannot serve anyone. We do not help another by becoming lost ourselves, and we do not create harmony by abandoning the ground from which harmony can arise. Take care of this practice, guard it, cultivate it, not because this small self is the most important thing in the universe, but because this is the place from which the whole universe is being met.
