On The Mother

CHAPTER 47

Readings in "Dhammapada"

I

From the middle of August 1957 till September 1958, every Friday evening the Mother used to read a few verses from the Dhammapada to a class consisting of students, teachers and Ashramites. Her commentaries, based on a French translation of the Pali text, were in French and were tape-recorded at the time. After reading a chapter, she would speak about the points that interested her and then asked the class to meditate on them.¹* As she said once:

Naturally, I took this text because I consider that at a particular stage of development it can be very useful. It is a discipline which has been crystallised in certain formulas and if one uses these formulas profitably, it can be very helpful... .²

The Dhammapada is among the supreme scriptures of the world, an analogue to the Bhagavad Gita and The Imitation of Christ; and although primarily addressed to Buddhists, it has a message for all, and will have always a freshness of its own. Whether or not the verses in the Dhammapada were actually uttered by the Buddha, they doubtless convey the general sense of his oft-repeated exhortations and admonitions to his followers. Comparing the Dhammapada with the Bhagavad Gita, N.K. Bhagawat writes: "Both purify the mind, mould it to a gentle, compassionate and understanding outlook, and enlighten the heart. For self-examination every night, for meditation every morning, these gems are priceless talismans."³

The heart of the human problem is that life is to be lived - lived wisely, courageously, fruitfully. Ignorance, fear, evil, these seem to encompass us all around; and we have to smash this ring and stand our ground. As against the maladies of ignorance, sorrow, fear, evil in their many impersonations, the remedy the Buddha proposed was the triple blessing of enlightenment, liberation and peace. The maladies are still current in our midst, and hence the remedy, in its essentials, is no less broadly relevant our own fear-haunted age. According to the Buddha, the extremes of asceticism and self-indulgence are to be shunned in favour of the Middle Path that leads to liberation and peace.

*An English translation by Nolini Kanta Gupta was serialised in The Advent from November 1960 to February 1965. Canto 24 ("Craving"), omitted in the earlier series, was printed in the April and August 1973 issues of The Advent. This translation, revised, appeared in 1977 as part of Questions and Answers, volume 3 of the Mother's Collected Works, pages 183-298; those pages were photographically reproduced in book-form in 1989 as Commentaries on the Dhammapada.

II

While giving readings from the Dhammapada and commentaries on them followed by meditations, the Mother was not only putting the children of the Ashram in rapport with the core of the Buddha's teaching, but she was also offering, when relevant, certain qualifications, amendments and additions to that ancient teaching in the light of Sri Aurobindo's and her own world-view. Once, indeed, she went further and said that, if one had already reached "a certain state of development and mental control", any further reading of the Dhammapada or meditating upon it becomes unnecessary.⁴

The Mother begins with the opening lines in the first canto of "Conjugate Verses" whose aim is "mental control" -. in other words, to observe, watch, control and master one's thoughts. Consciousness is at the root of all tendencies of character, and if we can have a pure or a purified consciousness, that will be to lay the sure foundations of happiness. Numberless thoughts besiege the mind and, storming it, cause a disturbance within. The Mother's advice is that one should withdraw oneself into one's true or real consciousness, and watch one's surface thoughts as an enlightened judge will, and sort out the good from the bad. At this stage, the "inner guard" must emerge and station himself at the gateway and allow only the good thoughts to enter the inner sanctum: "It is this movement of admission and refusal that we call thought-control.''

In the fifth verse of the opening canto the Buddha says: "For, in truth, in this world hatred is not appeased by hatred; hatred is appeased by love alone. This is the eternal law." On this the Mother's telling comment is that, if we must answer hatred by love, how much more true it is that love must be answered by Love? Compassion only for the wicked, the deficient, the misshapen, the unsuccessful, the failure is but "an encouragement to wickedness and failure". If instead, the divine Grace - "this immensity of Love which acts upon the world at every second" - be answered in all sincerity by "the spontaneous gratitude of a love which understands and appreciates, then things would change quickly in the world".⁵

As regards the fear of death, here too perfect self-control is the best line of defence. While in the Buddha's time nobody thought of the possibility of an earthly immortality, today there is Sri Aurobindo's assurance that this possibility is certainly there, but there is also the need for adequate preparation. In the Mother's words:

The essential condition even to prepare for it is to completely abolish all fear of death.

You must neither fear it nor desire it.

Stand above it, in an absolute tranquility, neither fear it not desire it.

Commenting on the 7th and 8th verses about Mara and the way to withstand his assaults, the Mother says that Mara is the symbol of all that opposes the spiritual life; he is indeed the engineer of spiritual death. A gale may fell a tree, but not a rock; likewise, Mara may knock down the man of little or no faith, but not the man anchored in the true faith or faith in "one's own possibilities".

Then, there is the ochre robe of the Buddhist monk, and of ascetics generally. But it is not the mere robe that makes the monk; it should also be matched within by "renunciation of all that is not an exclusive concentration upon the spiritual life". The impurities to be purged are egoism and ignorance, intemperance and untruthfulness. Translating the surface moral code into the deeper spiritual, the Mother says: "In all truly spiritual teachings, morality as it is mentally conceived is out of place." Balance, moderation, truthfulness, sincerity, honesty- these are certainly necessary for those who aim at spiritual life, but these should also be viewed in their inner integrality:

To be true to oneself, to one's goal, not to let oneself be moved by disorderly impulses, not to take the changing appearances for the Reality, these are the virtues that one must have in order to progress on the way of spirituality.

The 11th and 12th are another pair of verses that jointly elucidate the nature of error and the way to the good life. There is the all-too-common human tendency to take the false for true, and the true for false, but the deeper malady is men's love or infatuation for their very errors or untruths. The Mother's own experience is that it is never difficult to know the true as distinct from the false, both in big things and in small:

Whenever there is sincerity, you find that the help, the guidance, the grace are always there to give you the answer and you are not mistaken for long.

When the Dhammapada says: "Those who know the true to be true and the false to be false, they attain the supreme goal, for they pursue right desires and correct views," the Mother reads it as more than the accomplishment of complete withdrawal from life:

These few words, "they pursue right desires", are a proof that the teaching of the Buddha, in its essence, did not turn away from the realisation upon earth, but only from what is false in the conception of the world and in activities as they are carried on in the world. Thus when he teaches that one must escape from life, it is not to escape from a life that would be the expression of the truth but from the illusory life as it is ordinarily lived in the world.

Thus is the Buddha's core-teaching linked up with the Aurobindonian affirmation of the need to join the spiritual consciousness to an evolving

mental consciousness leading to the establishment here of a new Heaven and a new Earth. Such, the Mother feels, "was the original conception of the Buddhist teaching".

The 13th and 14th verses are about the need to have a quiet mind for the unsteady mind is like a house with a leaky roof. Most Buddhist schools give a key place to meditation as the means of achieving the quiet mind. From every point of view, then, it is good to practise silence regularly, for a few minutes at least twice a day, "but it must be a true silence, not merely abstention from talking".

In the next two sets of twin-verses, the point is made with homely figures that as you sow, so you reap. When an evil-doer begins seeing the ugliness of his actions, already he has reached "a very advanced stage", for the next step might be his not doing such things at all. To do wrong while knowing what is right can cause acute mental distress. Thus, to do the right thing always is to be able to preserve a quiet mind. The popular notion of heaven for the doers of good and hell for evil-doers must not be taken literally. The Mother says that what the Buddha insisted on was that "you create, by your conduct and the state of your consciousness, the world in which you live". Again:

You carry with you, around you, in you, the atmosphere created by your . actions, and if what you do is beautiful, good and harmonious, your atmosphere is beautiful, good and harmonious; on the other hand, if you live in a sordid selfishness, unscrupulous self-interest, ruthless bad will, that is what you will breathe every moment of your life and that means misery, constant uneasiness; it means ugliness that despairs of its own ugliness.

Nor is anything to be gained by leaving the body, for there is no 'geographical' heaven or hell to repair to - and so the Mother says categorically:

Expect nothing from death. Life is your salvation.

It is in life that you must transform yourself. It is upon earth that you progress and it is upon earth that you realise. It is in the body that you win the Victory.

The last pair of twin-verses reiterate the need to put practice before preaching or theoretical knowledge. It is not the recitation of scripture that is important, but the abandonment of all passion, all ill-will and all delusion, and the detachment from the lures here and elsewhere. The Dhammapada thus "clearly underlines that it is not enough to be free from the bonds of this world only, but of all the worlds".

III

The opening verses in the second canto on "Vigilance" start the Mother on a discussion between the old spiritual percipience and wisdom and the new science and technology. The words of T.S. Eliot are pertinent here:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries

Have taken us farther from God and nearer to the dust.

To progress in one's sadhana, vigilance - active as well as passive - is necessary; not merely must one avoid stagnation and relapse, but one must try also to accelerate one's progress. Nay more: true vigilance, a permanently heightened state of consciousness, is also joy. The Mother's comment here is most perceptive:

Throughout this teaching there is one thing to be noticed; it is this: you are never told that to live well, to think well, is the result of a struggle or of a sacrifice; on the contrary it is a delightful state which cures all suffering. At that time, the time of the Buddha, to live a spiritual life was a joy, a beatitude....

It is the materialism of modern times that has turned spiritual effort into a hard struggle and a sacrifice, a painful renunciation of all the so-called joys of life.

The excessive and still increasing materialism of our times has shut us to the splendours in the life of the Spirit. "From this point of view," says the Mother, "humanity is far from having progressed." Is it enough that the modern man has more comforts than the cave-man of thousands of years ago? But where is the old foresight, where are the dreamers and prophets and visionaries? Where ignorance oft parades as bliss, it has become folly to be able still to dream, to have a feeling for the invisible, or to "see a world in a grain of sand". Our preoccupation with the outer habiliments of life, our gadgets and pretty possessions, has driven us to renounce "the reality of inner life". "To become a little more conscious of oneself," says the Mother, "to enter into relation with the life behind the appearances, does not seem... to be the greatest good." The unschooled shepherd of old watched the stars at night and learned many things; he could commune with Nature, and he could sense the mystic beauty and peace around him. Satyakama Jabala tended his herd in the forest over a period of months and years till the ultimate Truths became an open book to him.

At the same time, it would not be wise today to cry down uncritically all scientific knowledge. Only this should not supersede or ignore the deeper knowledge of the Spirit. As the Mother sees it, what the world needs is a new integral knowledge:

Perhaps the time has come to continue the ascent in the curve of the spiral and now with all that this knowledge of matter has brought us, we shall be able to give to our spiritual progress a more solid basis. Strong with what we have learnt of the secrets of material Nature, we shall be able to join the two extremes and rediscover the supreme Reality in the very heart of the atom.

The Mother is unhappy that in translating verse 24 a virtuous life should be linked with the promise of 'fame ever growing'. She considers it unworthy of the Buddhist teaching, and remarks that "Those who have decided to abandon all worldly weakness certainly do not care about... acquiring a good name!" She would rather interpret the verse thus: "Whosoever can sustain his zeal, remain pure in his actions, act wisely, restrain his passions, live according to the inner truth, he shall see his spiritual glory ever growing." Then, taking the rest of the verses in canto 2 in their totality, the Mother stresses how, shunning all forms of negligence and practising all-round diligence, the Bhikkhu (or sadhaka) moves forward "like a fire consuming all bonds, great or small". One sheds all surplusage, one doesn't fritter away one's energies, one moves unwaveringly towards the goal. Likewise, commenting on the verses on "The Mind" in canto 3, the Mother underlines the warning that an ill-equipped, ill-organised or self-deceiving mind can do more harm to us than even an enemy. To expose in time one's own self-deceptions, one needs verily "the fearlessness of a true warrior, and an honesty, a straight-forwardness, a sincerity that never fail".

The Mother finds the canto on "The Flowers" full of wholesome counsel. People should worry about their own mistakes, not about those of others. Words without supporting action are like flowers without perfume. Just as the lotus comes out of the ooze, no matter how defective one's nature, there's still something within that can ultimately blossom forth. If there is strength of aspiration, it will be matched by realisation in due course. Yadbhāvam tadbhavati!

IV

Thus the Mother takes up canto after canto (there are twenty-six in all), reads the verses, draws attention to the most essential insights, and then gives a meditation. The verses in the canto on "The Fool" provoke this comment:

One could easily replace throughout this text the word fool by the word ego. One who lives in his ego, for his ego, in the hope of satisfying his ego, is the fool. Unless you transcend ego... you cannot hope to attain the goal.

In the canto on "The Sage", one's unsuspected defect is compared to a hidden treasure, and the friend who shows such a defect is truly a benefactor:

For those who practise a yogic discipline consider that the moment you know that a thing should not be, you have the power to remove it, discard it, destroy it.

To discover a fault is an acquisition. It is as though a flood of light had come to replace the little speck of obscurity which has just been driven out.

In the canto on "The Thousands", a single verbal formula ("Better than a thousand... is a single...") is exploited in a variety of contexts, but the seminal idea is just this: "It is preferable to have one moment of sincerity rather than a long life of apparent devotion and ... a psychological and spiritual victory over oneself is more important than all external victories." The verses in the canto on "Punishment" strike the Mother as being addressed rather to primitive audiences, for things have radically changed since then:

Mental capacity seems to have grown, mental power seems to have developed, men seem to be much more capable of playing with ideas... but at the same time they have lost the simple and healthy candour of people who lived closer to Nature and knew less how to play with ideas.

While a return to the past will not be wise, the current materialistic trends certainly carry the seeds of corruption and catastrophe. The solution therefore is to advance boldly, "climb greater heights and go beyond the arid search for pleasure and personal welfare, not through fear of punishment, even punishment after death, but through the development of a new sense of beauty, a thirst for truth and light.... One must rise up and widen - rise up... and widen."

The verses in the canto on "Old Age" occasion the enunciation by the Mother of her own robust philosophy. It is not simply a matter of years, but of cessation of growth:

As soon as you stop advancing, as soon as you stop progressing, as soon as you cease to better yourself, cease to gain and grow, cease to transform yourself, you truly become old... you go downhill towards disintegration. ...

Everything that has been done is always nothing compared with what remains to be done.

Do not look behind. Look ahead, always ahead and go forward always!

The canto on "The Ego", the Mother says, deals actually with egoism or selfishness rather than with Ego which is "much more difficult to seize, because, in fact, to realise what the ego is one must already be out of it".

No spiritual progress can be registered unless the ego is effectively tackled:

If you are a candidate for supermanhood, you must resolve to dispense with your ego, to go beyond it, for as long as you keep it with you, the supermind will be for you something unknown and inaccessible.

But if through effort, through discipline, through progressive mastery, you surmount your ego and go beyond it, even if only in the tiniest part of your being, this acts like the opening of a small window somewhere and by looking carefully through the window, you will be able to glimpse the supermind. And that is a promise.

V

The canto on "The Awakened One (The Buddha)", refers to the Four Truths and the Eightfold Noble Path, and the Mother explains them succinctly. The eighth and last stage of the Path, Correct Contemplation, she defines as "Egoless thought concentrated on the essence of things, on the inmost truth and on the goal to be attained." This leads her to a discussion of 'boredom' as the anti-thesis of correct contemplation. For most people the bête noire is boredom, and trying to escape it, they wallow in stupidities. What's the remedy, then? The Mother's directions are precise and unexceptionable:

When you have a little time... tell yourself, "At last, I have some time to concentrate, to collect myself, to relive the purpose of my life, to offer myself to the True and the Eternal."...

...sit down quietly before the sky, before the sea or under trees, whatever is possible... and try to realise one of these things - to understand why you live, to learn how you must live, to ponder over what you want to do and what should be done, what is the best way of escaping from the ignorance and falsehood and pain in which you live.

Of the verses in the canto on "Happiness", the fourth sounds particularly fine to the Mother:

Happy is he who possesses nothing, he will partake of the delight of the radiant gods.

To possess nothing "does not at all mean not to make use of anything, not to have anything at one's disposal", but rather "to have equal joy" in the use as in the absence of things. It is the sense of ownership that enslaves you to things. And what is this delight of detachment? The Mother gives her own spiritual connotation of the word:

Delight means to live in the Truth, to live in communion with Eternity, with the true Life, the Light that never fails. Delight means to be free, free with the true Freedom, the Freedom of the constant, invariable union with the Divine Will....

When you no longer possess anything, you can become as vast as the universe.

One Friday, after the meditation on the verses from the canto on "Anger", the Mother proposes that her audience should, for just an hour a day for a whole week, resolve "to say nothing but the absolutely indispensable words. Not one more, not one less." Next week she is gratified with the results; actually, one of the children had written that, having begun, he would like to continue, and to extend the period of the daily discipline beyond the hour!

The canto on "The Just Man", concludes with the need to accomplish the total extinction of desire. The Mother, however, has her own views on this question, for hers is the positive way:

If... instead of undertaking a long, arduous, painful, disappointing hunt after desires, one gives oneself simply, totally, unconditionally, if one surrenders to the Supreme Reality, to the Supreme Will, to the Supreme Being, putting oneself entirely in His hands, in an upsurge of the whole being and all the elements of the being, without calculating, that would be the swiftest and the most radical way to get rid of the ego. People will say that it is difficult to do it, but at least a warmth is there, an ardour, an enthusiasm, a light, a beauty, an ardent and creative life.

Again, for the Mother, Nirvana is not annihilation pure and simple, but "the disappearance of the ego into the splendour of the Supreme".

The canto on "The Path" is full of useful advice. But the Mother feels that in our time something more is called for. During the last few centuries, there has been phenomenal intellectual development; there has been witnessed much 'progress', but along with these we witness ^also misery, disunion, chaos. To get out of it all, to transform it all, something more is needed than what is indicated in the canto. While talking of the present discontents, we should also know our way out of the mess:

But that one can emerge from it through a total realisation, a total transformation, through a new light that will establish order and harmony in things, is a message of hope that has to be given....

A new life must be built.

Then all these difficulties that seemed so unsurmountable - oh! they fall of themselves.

When you can live in light and joy, are you going to cling to shadow and suffering?

As for the verses in the canto on "Niraya (Hell)", the Mother doesn't read them in their superficial sense. Hell is not the place where one is punished for one's sins. "The true sense of Niraya is that particular kind of atmosphere which one creates around oneself when one acts in contradiction, not with outer moral rules or social principles, but with the inner law of one's being... the divine Presence in every human being, which should be the master and guide of our life." To follow the true Path, to do Yoga, one has to open to this inner light, and one should be anchored in utter sincerity:

True sincerity consists in advancing on the way because you cannot do otherwise, to consecrate yourself to the divine life because you cannot do otherwise, to seek to transform your being and come out into the light because you cannot do otherwise, because it is the purpose of your life.

After the meditation on the last of the cantos, the canto on "The Brahmin", the Mother speaks of a still higher evolutionary ideal than the precise goal of the Buddhistic Nirvana:

There is a deep trust in the divine Grace, a total surrender to the divine Will, an integral adhesion to the divine Plan which makes one do the thing to be done without concern for the result. That is the perfect liberation.

That is truly the abolition of suffering. The consciousness is filled with an unchanging delight and each step you take reveals a marvel of splendour.

And the Mother's concluding word on the Dhammapada is pure gratitude, leaving "the goal and the result of our endeavour to the Supreme Wisdom that surpasses all understanding".

The Mother's comments on selected verses from the Dhammapada at once illuminate the ancient teaching of the Buddha and set it in the wider Aurobindonian perspectives of life-transformation and world-transformation. The Mother had always a deep feeling for Shakyamuni and admired the nobility of his life and the radiant purity of his teachings. But she had also won her way to the Supramental Vision, and she therefore felt the need to offer the necessary correctives to the old teaching in the light of Sri Aurobindo's and her own insights and realisations.