Dhammapada Reflections | Part Six | Chapters Nine & Ten
CHAPTER 9
EVIL
9:1. Hasten to do good; restrain your mind from evil. He who is slow in doing good, his mind delights in evil.
9:2. Should a person commit evil, let him not do it again and again. Let him not find pleasure therein, for painful is the accumulation of evil.
9:3. Should a person do good, let him do it again and again. Let him find pleasure therein, for blissful is the accumulation of good.
9:4. It may be well with the evil-doer as long as the evil ripens not. But when it does ripen, then the evil-doer sees the painful results of his evil deeds.
9:5. It may be ill with the doer of good as long as the good ripens not. But when it does ripen, then the doer of good sees the pleasant results of his good deeds.
9:6. Think not lightly of evil, saying, “It will not come to me.” Drop by drop is the water pot filled. Likewise, the fool, gathering it little by little, fills himself with evil.
9:7. Think not lightly of good, saying, “It will not come to me.” Drop by drop is the water pot filled. Likewise, the wise man, gathering it little by little, fills himself with good.
9:8. Just as a trader with a small escort and great wealth would avoid a perilous route, or just as one desiring to live avoids poison, even so should one shun evil.
9:9. If on the hand there is no wound, one may carry even poison in it. Poison does not affect one who is free from wounds. For him who does no evil, there is no ill.
9:10. Like fine dust thrown against the wind, evil falls back upon that fool who offends an inoffensive, pure and guiltless man.
9:11. Some are born in the womb; the wicked are born in hell; the devout go to heaven; the stainless pass into Nibbana.
9:12. Neither in the sky nor in mid-ocean, nor by entering into mountain clefts, nowhere in the world is there a place where one may escape from the results of evil deeds.
9:13. Neither in the sky nor in mid-ocean, nor by entering into mountain clefts, nowhere in the world is there a place where one will not be overcome by death.
CHAPTER 10
VIOLENCE
10:1. All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.
10:2. All tremble at violence; life is dear to all. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.
10:3. One who, while himself seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other beings who also desire happiness, will not attain happiness hereafter.
10:4. One who, while himself seeking happiness, does not oppress with violence other beings who also desire happiness, will find happiness hereafter.
10:5. Speak not harshly to anyone, for those thus spoken to might retort. Indeed, angry speech hurts, and retaliation may overtake you.
10:6. If, like a broken gong, you silence yourself, you have approached Nibbana, for vindictiveness is no longer in you.
10:7. Just as a cowherd drives the cattle to pasture with a staff, so do old age and death drive the life force of beings from existence to existence.
10:8. When the fool commits evil deeds, he does not realize their evil nature. The witless man is tormented by his own deeds, like one burnt by fire.
10:9. He who inflicts violence on those who are unarmed, and offends those who are inoffensive, will soon come upon one of these ten states:
10:10–12. Sharp pain, or disaster, bodily injury, serious illness, or derangement of mind, trouble from the government, or grave charges, loss of relatives, or loss of wealth, or houses destroyed by ravaging fire; upon dissolution of the body that ignorant man is born in hell.
10:13. Neither going about naked, nor matted locks, nor filth, nor fasting, nor lying on the ground, nor smearing oneself with ashes and dust, nor sitting on the heels in penance can purify a mortal who has not overcome doubt.
10:14. Even though he be well-attired, yet if he is poised, calm, controlled and established in the holy life, having set aside violence towards all beings—he, truly, is a holy man, a renunciate, a monk.
10:15. Only rarely is there a man in this world who, restrained by modesty, avoids reproach, as a thoroughbred horse avoids the whip.
10:16. Like a thoroughbred horse touched by the whip, be strenuous, be filled with spiritual yearning. By faith and moral purity, by effort and meditation, by investigation of the truth, by being rich in knowledge and virtue, and by being mindful, destroy this unlimited suffering.
10:17. Irrigators regulate the waters, fletchers straighten arrow shafts, carpenters shape wood, and the good control themselves.
SENSEI MICHAEL COMMENTARY
CHAPTERS IX-X | EVIL & VIOLENCE
Chapter nine begins with urgency: “Hasten to do good.” Good cannot finally be postponed because good can only be done here. We cannot practice yesterday and we cannot practice tomorrow. To do good is to become fully immersed in this moment, to meet what is actually present before we replace it with our judgments, fears, ideological constructions, and stories about what should be happening instead. The moment of practice is always now because the living essence of our life is always now.
The Dhammapada then tells us that if we do evil, we should not repeat it, and if we do good, we should do it again and again. We can hear this as a teaching about habit, but there is something deeper happening. To do evil is, in a way, to take the karmic reality we have constructed and use it as a surrogate for the living truth right before us. Something arises, and instead of meeting it directly, we meet our judgment of it. We meet our fear of it. We meet the ideology through which we have decided what it means. We carve the field into self and other and then act from the division we created.
Once we begin dwelling there, it becomes very easy to be carried away by the stream. One judgment gives rise to another. One act of resentment prepares the ground for the next. One moment of certainty strengthens the structure from which the next certainty will arise. We begin living more and more deeply inside the world we have manufactured and less and less intimately with the world that is actually here.
The reverse is also true. Every time we choose wonder over the karmic self, we cultivate more of what we cherish. Every time we pause before crystallizing around what appears, every time we allow the living moment to be larger than our explanation of it, something is being cultivated. Drop by drop the water pot fills. Awakening is not somewhere outside these tiny movements. Bondage is not somewhere outside them either.
This helps us understand why the Dhammapada says that evil may appear pleasant before its fruit ripens and good may appear difficult before its fruit becomes visible. If our measure is simply what the small self wants right now, resentment can feel extraordinarily satisfying. Being right can feel good. Retaliation can feel powerful. Clinging to certainty can make us feel secure. And relinquishing those things can initially feel like loss. But the important question is not whether an action comforts the karmic self in this moment. The question is: what kind of world are we creating through it? Every act touches the entire universe.
Karma is not some private account kept somewhere on our behalf, a great cosmic abacus in the sky. Every word, every action, every movement of mind enters the whole field of causes and conditions. And when we recognize that this field extends through all space and time, the consequences become almost impossible to comprehend. There is nowhere an action can occur privately. There is no isolated corner in which hatred can remain contained. What we do participates in what becomes possible next by creating the causes and conditions in which it flourishes.
This is why there is nowhere to escape the consequences of evil deeds. Where would we go? We are already inside the field we have created. Every action enters the whole. There is no outside place from which we can observe our karma without participating in it.
The image of poison makes this even subtler. If there is no wound in the hand, poison can be carried without entering the body. What is present is always pure before the act of judgment divides it into self and other, desirable and undesirable, threatening and safe. The poison gains entry through the wound we create when we carve the field apart and then cling to the distinction. Conditions arise. Difficult people arise. Anger arises. Pain arises. None of this, in itself, requires the construction of a separate self who must now defend itself against what has appeared.
To shun evil, then, is not merely to become afraid of bad actions. It is to maintain wonder, include the whole of what is present, and allow compassion to arise before our manufactured certainty takes over. We stop entering the road that we already know leads into separation.
The text continues that evil directed toward the innocent returns like fine dust thrown against the wind. This does not require us to imagine some mysterious punishment imposed from outside. The return is already taking place in the act itself. When I act from hatred, I deepen the world in which hatred makes sense. When I establish another person as enemy, I strengthen the structure of self and other through which I myself must then continue to live. The dust has already begun blowing back.
We are then directed to observe hell, heaven, and Nibbana. We can honor that cosmological meaning while also noticing how immediately these realms arise. We create heaven and hell through judgment and clinging. We know what it is to live inside resentment, fear, envy, longing, or self-righteousness and call that world reality. We also know what it is, even briefly, to put all of that down. Put it down and where are you? Nibbana is not somewhere else. When the constructed realm no longer governs us, freedom is already visible.
Likewise, there is nowhere can we escape death. This returns us again to urgency. There is nowhere outside karma and nowhere outside death. So where will we practice? Here. When will we practice? Now. We do not have another life hidden somewhere outside this one in which we can finally begin meeting things directly.
Chapter ten turns this toward violence:
“All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.”
We could hear this simply as empathy: imagine how the other person feels. That is certainly present. This teaching, however, transcends even that. When we recognize our True Nature, we begin to see ourselves reflected everywhere we look because nothing is outside. The life that recoils from injury in me is not fundamentally separate from the life before me. The desire for happiness, safety, freedom, and continued existence is appearing everywhere. When nothing is outside, violence becomes extraordinarily difficult to justify.
Violence requires separation. I have to make your pain belong to you and my desire belong to me. I have to establish enough distance between us that your suffering can become the acceptable price of what I want. That is how the karmic world is built.
It is also so with harsh speech. Violence does not begin only when a fist is raised. Speech creates worlds of real harm, too. A harsh word enters the field and produces conditions. It invites retaliation. It gives another person something from which their own anger may arise, and then we are surprised when the whole cycle comes back toward us!
The Buddha gives a powerful teaching elsewhere in the Parable of the Two Arrows. The first arrow is the pain that life delivers. Bodies hurt. People speak harshly. Loss occurs. The second arrow is the one we add ourselves: resentment, rehearsal, blame, self-pity, retaliation, the repeated story of what should not have happened.
The first arrow may not have been ours to choose.
The second one is.
So it also is with the broken gong. When struck, the gong no longer continues to reverberate. Vindictiveness has ceased. Something may have happened. The first arrow may have landed. But we do not spend the next ten years firing the second arrow again and again into the same wound.
This is not passivity. It is refusing to continue manufacturing the conflict.
The text then gives a very traditional list of consequences that may follow violence: pain, illness, loss, trouble with authorities, destruction, hell. We do not need to turn this into a literal prediction that every harmful act will produce one particular punishment. The deeper point is already enormous: violence propagates consequences far beyond what we can foresee or control. Once an action enters the stream of causes and conditions, we do not get to decide where its effects stop.
This cannot be a simple step toward some notion of religious austerity. Nakedness, matted hair, fasting, ashes, sleeping on the ground, all of it is useless if the underlying activity remains untouched. We cannot purify our practice by judging it. We cannot attack ourselves into awakening. The moment we decide that some impure self must be violently purified, the self is once again seated at the center of the enterprise. Join the flow of the immediate present and be free.
A person may be beautifully dressed and still be a holy person if they are calm, restrained, and have set violence aside. Holiness is not located in costume. It is not deprivation. It is not how convincingly we perform renunciation. It is revealed in the quality of our participation with life.
Then comes the image of the thoroughbred horse, responsive even to the lightest touch of the whip. This is a beautiful image of practice because genuine awakening must include recognition of our delusion. If enlightenment becomes another claim that says, I now see clearly and therefore cannot be mistaken, we have fallen asleep again. To be awake is also to be awake to our capacity to become lost.
This is modesty in the deepest sense. We do not need catastrophe to wake us up. We do not need life to beat us repeatedly over the head before we notice that we have wandered into our own certainty. We can feel the lightest touch. We can notice the first movement of resentment, the first hardening of judgment, the first moment in which manufactured knowledge begins replacing living wisdom.
The Buddha tells us to destroy this unlimited suffering. But suffering is not an object sitting somewhere waiting to be annihilated. What must end is the activity that continually creates and transmits it: the substitution of manufactured knowledge for wisdom, certainty for wonder, separation for the living field before us.
And so the chapter ends with images we have already encountered: irrigators directing water, fletchers straightening arrows, carpenters shaping wood.
Practice is cultivation.
Moment after moment we shape the way we participate in this vast field. We can deepen the grooves of karmic certainty or we can return to wonder. We can reinforce separation or we can recognize that nothing is outside. We can fire the second arrow or we can allow the first to land without building a whole world around it.
Every act touches all space and time.
With every act, the whole stream changes direction.
