Dhammapada 165 ~ By oneself one is purified

Sole responsibility "By oneself one does evil. By oneself one is defiled. By oneself one abstains from evil. By oneself one is purified. Purity and impurity are personal matters. No one can purify someone else" (Dhammapada 165). Next to the Four Aryan Truths and the Eightfold Aryan Path, this is perhaps the most important of Buddha's philosophical teachings. It is uncompromising truth: our life is in our hands and ours alone. Yes, we can be influenced by others and even have others affect our life--but it is our choice to do so and we determine to what degree we will be affected. Certainly we reach into the world around us and take to ourselves various elements, but we do that intentionally. Those who wish to escape responsibility insist that something is beyond their control, that they could not help themselves in a certain situation. But even those situations and that susceptibility were determined by them previously. For example, if a person builds a brick wall incompetently and it falls on him and injures him, they certainly did not build it with that as their purpose, but their incompetence brought the injury about, so at the root it was all in their sphere, none else. What about those harmed or even killed in "natural disasters"? That was their karma which they themselves created, and on a subliminal level they understood all the implications when they created that karma. Another example occurred to a healer friend of mind. It was his practice to tune in with the inner mind of a person before attempting to heal them (actually, he taught them to heal themselves). When he tuned into a little girl who was severely retarded, to his shock a deep, male voice shouted: "Leave me alone, I know what I am doing!" He realized this was the voice of the child's former personality, and that the retardation was for a purpose--she was retarded by her own choice. Occasionally he would tune in and ask: "Have you learned what you need, yet?" "No," would be the answer. Then one day her inner mind said: "Yes. You can help me now." And that girl became totally normal. So here we see that it is all our choice, even when another factor enters our life and changes it. Buddha spoke these words to people who had already produced in themselves a significant degree of awakening. Yet they (yes, by their choice) still carried with them mistaken ideas from past religious experience, including the fundamental bane of most religion: the attribution of responsibility to forces other than themselves, especially the reflexive attribution of everything to God. But now they had chosen to approach Buddha to be freed from those childish beliefs, and he did not fail them. Those clinging to the errors of the past accused Buddha of being atheistic, but he was not. You might just as well call someone atheistic if they said God had nothing to do with their cooking failures. Being the Source of all, everything involves God. But there are certain areas in which human beings control everything, and their life is one of them. God has manifested all the worlds and the various forms in which we incarnate. God has also woven various "laws" into the fabric of relative existence which operate at all times without exception. The universe is a great interactive school of learning set up so the students can teach themselves--a kind of ultimate Montessori school. The use, misuse, or neglect of the school and the opportunities it offers are solely the choice of each student. Morality Buddha gave another not very popular teaching: one of the signs of awakening is the ability to feel shame--yes, guilt. Morality is of prime concern in the dharma of Buddha, despite the fact that Westerners flock to Buddhism (or a deformation thereof) to get away from "Judeo-Christian morality." Vain hope! All Eastern religions have moral principles far more complex and realistic than those of Western religions. The difference is, they are voluntary and are not forced on others. That is of course, a better situation, but anyone who thinks they can shake their guilt by "turning East" are self-deluded. The practical side to moral principles is the capacity of the individual for both defilement and purification. Therefore Buddha taught: By oneself one does evil. No one else is involved in the final analysis, for we act solely from our own ever-free will. Even a bent or perverted will got that way by the person's own past choices. So their apparent bondage is the result of the exercise of free will. It is habitual with people to blame environment, other people, disadvantages, etc., but action is done only by each one of us. That is why in one of the Pali sutras there is a section which contains statements such as: "There shall be lying, but we shall not lie. There shall be killing, but we shall not kill. There shall be stealing, but we shall not steal." This is the way it must be understood. We are not herd animals, even though society is usually nothing more than a herd. We are individuals with our own minds and wills. If we choose to run with the herd, it is still all our doing. A sensible aspirant knows that all around him people will be engaging in adharmic actions, and that should not influence him in the least. Yes; there will be wrongdoing, but we shall not do wrong. Wrong actions condition the mind and will to wrongdoing, but that is our choice. We do not do wrong because our wills are weak, but because they are strong and we have pointed them in the wrong direction. By oneself one is defiled. Much of this has just been covered. Eastern religion understands that wrongdoing does not anger God, but that it brings negative results--karma--into our lives, and even worse, it defiles our minds and hearts, darkening and distorting them. This latter is the worst part, because karma can be exhausted, but defilement stays on, inclining us to more of the same negative actions. By oneself one abstains from evil. Again, this is not a group thing--it is totally individual, although we can certainly draw inspiration from others to apply our free will in the right direction. Still, it is a completely personal, private matter. People who cannot stand alone on their own simply will not succeed in the pursuit of higher life. It is not for weaklings, whiners, or cowards. That is why spiritual teachers often use examples from military life, and the Bhagavad Gita is set on a battlefield. By oneself one is purified. Purification is possible--this is Buddha's message of hope--and it can be fully accomplished by us, by our free will. In Parsifal, Parsifal touches the spear to the wounded side of Amfortas, saying: "That which wounded alone can heal." The spear represents the will of the individual. Of course we must know the way to purify ourself, not just cover up the wounds. Meditation is the supreme healer through self-purification. Purity and impurity are personal matters. No, we did not inherit a propensity to evil from Adam, ancestors, "racial memory" or "collective unconscious" (oh, come on), our parents or society. Many people try to blame traumatic experiences, but those experiences came about because they were their karma--results of their past deeds committed through free will. There are no victims, only reapers of personal karma. Good and evil, purity and impurity, are our choice alone. No one can purify someone else. How important this is! False religion and false gurus pretend to be able to purify us and forgive our sins. NOT AT ALL. It is a destructive mythology, no matter how sincere it may be. No one takes away our sins--not even us. We must purify ourselves. Sometimes in yogic treatises it will be stated that a practice burns away of washes away impurities, but it is the individual's engaging in the practice that purifies. And that is a matter of will and action. Actually we see this principle in the life of Jesus. Many times when people were healed by his touch he would assure them that their own faith was what healed them. This was not modesty, but honesty. Their faith and their effort in coming to him was a healing karma, and even more it was an opening, an allying of their will with his. So their healing was their doing, although Jesus was the instrument. We are the answer to our own problems once we know the way to higher life and consciousness. Read more commentaries of the Dhammapada by Swami Nirmalananda.

Excerpt from Vivekananda's letter

Never during his life did Ramakrishna refuse a single prayer of mine. Millions of offenses has he forgiven me. Such great love even my parents never had for me. There is no poetry, no exaggeration in all this. It is the bare truth and every disciple of his knows it.

Swami Vivekananda in Letter to Pramada Das Mitra. Written in Bengali from Ghazipur on March 3, 1890. Complete Works, 6.232.