MEDITATIONS: THE DHAMMAPADA, CHAPTER TWELVE

oNESELF

Evil is done by oneself alone;
By oneself is one defiled.
Evil is avoided by oneself;
By oneself alone is one purified.
Purity and impurity depend on oneself;
No one can purify another. (Buddha 40)

The soil from which either good or evil grows is that of affirmation or denial of being itself. The former is acceptance, responsibility, and voluntarism. It is the choice to bear the constraining and oppressive chains of one’s individual existence willingly. From this choice is born strength, of will among all other forms of power necessary to actualize one’s ends. The latter option, to choose denial, is to reject what is, to abscond responsibility, and to position oneself as an unwilling victim of the world. This is to choose to lament one’s limitations and constraints, to weep and gnash teeth, and to blame external causes for their unfairness and arbitrariness. From this choice is born weakness, dependence on others to rectify one’s own situation, and a vengeful resentment whose fruits are invariably discord, destruction, and evil intent.

Why? Because:

It’s easy to do what is not good
And things that harm oneself.
It’s very difficult to do
Things beneficial and good.

The unwise who rely on evil views
To malign the teachings of the noble arahants
Who live the Dharma
Produce fruit that destroys themselves,
Like the kathaka reed that dies upon bearing fruit. (40)

The nature of existence is entropic: without effort, all things tend toward undifferentiation, toward nothingness. Therefore, it is always easier to do evil unto oneself and others because all one must do to engender evil is nothing. Vice comes without effort and without strength, whereas virtue is a product of practice and cultivation.

So too is ignorance more natural than wisdom. Chaotic, disjointed, inarticulate thought and words are the default of all who refuse to pursue wisdom and virtue in their own lives. Absent virtue, the vicious lack the wisdom to foster their own flourishing. Such self-neglect, without any effort necessary, will inevitably bring about weakness, disease, suffering, and death. What’s more, it shall bring about resentment, envy, and jealousy. The sick and suffering shall hate life and shall hate most those who love it—for no others remind them more of their miserable state, nor do any others more greatly suggest merely by their existence that the sick and suffering could have chosen differently.

Thus is the distance between the high and the low, the master and the slave. Thus is why the Buddha advises:

Don’t give up your own welfare
For the sake of others’ welfare, however great.
Clearly know your own welfare
And be intent on the highest good. (41)

Oneself, indeed, is one’s own protector.
What other protector could their be?
With self-control
One gains a protector hard to obtain. (39)

Vigilance is necessary as a matter of course, but it is all the more necessary in a world of sufferers who lack the requisite faith to gaze upon the actual world. One who cannot muster the strength to face the truth, about himself or anything else, is one who cannot bring himself to love fate more than his false idols. That is to say, he is one who will hold lies as his highest value because he finds truth—honesty, reality, objectivity, that-is-which-is, God, the Tao—too cold and prickly to voluntarily embrace. He cannot help himself; he will believe he means well while simultaneously acting in bad-faith: bad-faith meaning he will act as though truth itself is untrustworthy, his enemy, and something to revenge against.

If you love life, see being itself as precious even for all its arbitrary pains and injustices, then you must become an object of resentment and blind, unconscious vengeance by all those too weak to love their own existences. That it why it is imperative to protect oneself. There is no one else who can cultivate virtue in you, for anything involuntary becomes an object of resentment.

If one must provide structure for others’ cultivation of virtue, for children or students, for instance, than one ought first and foremost secure virtue in himself:

In first establishing himself
In what is proper
And only then teaching others,
The sage will not be stained.

As one instructs other,
So should one do oneself:
Only the self-controlled should restrain others.
Truly, it’s hard to restrain oneself. (39)

Avoid hypocrisy. If you find it, do not hide it but let it burn away in the light of day. Better is it to purge oneself of vices than to allow them to fester, for one day you may become someone another must rely on. In such a moment, if your own soul is riddled with rot-holes, both you and your dependent will break. You will crumble and find yourself stained with the evils you had worked so hard to restrain yourself from.

It is not sufficient to be continent if one is to live in the world among others. In such conditions, virtue is one’s only salvation. And to be virtuous means to orient one’s desires toward that which is good, that which is in accord or in harmony with the nature of existence. Likewise, to be virtuous is to direct one’s aversions toward those deviations from the accordant path. Cultivate distaste for that which is bad, that which propagates weakness in the self which further facilitates evil and eventual destruction—of others and of oneself.

Each one of us is he for whom we are individually responsible.

Buddha Siddhartha Gautama. The Dhammapada; Teachings of the Buddha, translated by Gil Fronsdal, Shambala Publications Inc, 2008.