Dhammapada is the spiritual testament of the Buddha. Flashes of insight that illuminated the Buddha-Heart have been crystallized into luminous verses of pure wisdom. As the Buddhist manual of right living, Dhammapada is a world classic and a perennial source of inspirations. The basic concepts of Buddhism have been marshalled in this resume of the sacred Pali Canon in a way that even a simple, unsophisticated seeker of truth can benefit from as much as, or perhaps more than a scholar burdened with the weight of learning.
 

The idea of oozing, seeping or percolating is bound up with the idea of layers, levels, areas and time. This is exactly what the concept of life is in Buddhism, that is, a process or progression from life to life through different planes of existence, through different levels and modes of psycho-physical formation. This dynamic imagery of life is called samsara, wandering in the sense of drifting or existential vagrancy.
 

In the Dhammapada, asava is a synonym of samsara, aimless drifting and endless wandering. It emphasizes an existential situation, which has neither permanent footing nor purpose. Asava, effluent or discharge by its very own nature, percolates without a purpose, pollutes without a purpose, pollutes without provocation, plagues without punishing, perplexes without persecuting. Even so it is with samsara. By its very changeful, impersonal and conditioned nature, it perpetuates a perennial stream of discrete discontinuous, distinct, individual units of becoming called life.

The only meaningful goal of life, and therefore also the true objective for all spiritual endeavour is what is called Khinasava, the canker-free state. A wise caravan leader has for guidance the pole star, or some such reliable reference point, as he travels through infinite stretches of perilous and arid desert, made more fearsome by the countless carcasses strewn all over of those victims who, losing the way lost their lives. Similarly, the seeker of truth should have the three vimokkhas (spiritual deliverance), leading to the Khinasava state, as the only reliable instrument or guide for his journey through the desert of samsara unto Nibbana.
 

And to that extent, if ever a book can be called a friend, a philosopher and a guide, it is Dhammapada. To the simple and unsophisticated devotee, Dhammapada is like unto a sympathetic and understanding counsellor, on the erudite scholar bearing the academic burden its pithy and wise sayings exert a most sobering effect, even as a true philosopher humbles a pretentious intellectual. And to the earnest seeker of truth Dhammapada is aa guide par excellence.

It is often made out that the question of good and bad is notional, that in reality the so-called good or the bad does not exist. That is to say, right and wrong, good and bad, are concepts having conventional validity and do not have ultimate content.

Nothing can be father from the truth, for if there were no such thing as good and bad per se, in an absolute sense, there would be no such thing in the world as misery and happiness, poverty and prosperity, beauty and ugliness, disease and health. The inequalities one finds in the world only express the truth of moral causation called kamma in Buddhism. And morality means the science that deals with good and bad.
 

People who toil to amass wealth or to get influence and fame and power, or to remain entrenched in position and status, or even to eke out a morsel of food just to exist, infallibly have to struggle. And people who do just the opposite namely, to purge their mind of all evil, to outgrow sensuality, to achieve a spiritual excellence and self-mastery, they too unavoidably have to struggle. But then, between these two modes of struggle there is a world of difference, a qualitative distinction.
 

Of all cankers, it is said the canker of ignorance is the worst. Most insidious and tenacious, it is the matrix of all evil. Not only is ignorance not ‘knowing’, but knowing perversely and deludedly. It is the canker of ignorance which makes evil appear good, the changeful changeless, the ugly beautiful, the painful pleasant, the unsatisfactory satisfactory. Since it is both abysmal and pervasive it produces the illusion of permanence, etc., and thereby keeps a being in perpetual bondage. It is through the machinations of the canker of ignorance that man remains blissfully unaware of the painful realities of samsara.

When a person indulges in unwholesome thinking, the dormant cankers becomes activated and the activated ones get further vitalized. Similarly, when one reflects in a wise way and comprehends things as they really are, the dormant ones, not been activated, die of atrophy, and the activated ones are removed. From the standpoint of psychology, this teaching of the Buddha has a tremendous significance. The whole mechanism of the development of mind and the unfolding of the spiritual potential rests on this premise.

When the Buddha speficied that it is for ‘one who understands and comprehends that there is the riddance of cankers’, all that is emphasized is the imperative of training and education. In the world where beings are caught up in the enmeshment of sensuality and delusion, it is hardly possible for them to comprehend the realities of this enmeshment itself. A sick man cannot be expected to carry out a task which only a healthy man can do. Similarly, those who are entangled, and who want to remain entangled and have no interest in getting themselves disentangled, are certainly sick people mentally, and for them to accomplish this task would require appropriate education and training. They have to be motivated to undertake this task and they must re-orient their mental approach so as to enable themselves to fulfill the task. That is all, and this certainly does not mean excluding anybody. The universality of the Message of the Master is further accentuated and never contradicted or diminished by the emphasis that everyone should be helped to understand and comprehend, and not just encouraged to remain blinded by mandatory faith, dogma and commandments.
 

Wisdom in action in essence, is wise consideration which is the heart of spiritual life and the foundation on which the mansion of spiritual deliverance (vimokkha) is built. If not for wise thinking, life would be despoiled by the cankers (asavas).
 

When the mind is in the grip of cankers, all thoughts, urges and other mental activities become distorted. If it is deconditioned and set aright, and one learns to view life in a new perspective, against the backdrop of reality, as a stream of ill, as something conditioned, involved and substantial, then life becomes an adventure unto Deliverance.