Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 15-minute talk, Lama Ribur Rinpoche examines two verses from the Dhammapada’s Dharma chapter that challenge a widespread misunderstanding about beauty in Buddhism. Many practitioners wrongly assume that beauty is dangerous and must be avoided, leading some to deliberately look as ugly as possible in pursuit of spirituality. The teacher traces this misconception to parallels in Puritan Christianity and then carefully unpacks what the Buddha actually means by “beauty of form” and “eloquence”—discussing physical complexion, voice quality, and the historical context of caste and color consciousness in ancient India. He then explores why the verses identify jealousy, selfishness, and deceit as true ugliness: these are projected qualities that directly harm others, unlike pride or talkativeness. Throughout, he argues that genuine beauty lies in the destruction of these defilements, not in the denial of outward form. Suitable for newcomers encountering common misconceptions about Buddhist aesthetics.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01eTrack ASDhammika.mp3
UUID: 02987743-37b5-48fa-853f-5b9b3024edf5
Teacher: Lama Ribur Rinpoche
Collection: Dhammika (Lama Ribur Rinpoche)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 15.5 minutes
Words: ~1,903
Right. Good evening, and welcome. Those of you who have come for the first time, we extend a warm welcome to you also and hope that you will come again sometime in the future. We are continuing our series of talks on the sayings of the Buddha from the Dhammapada. The Dhammapada being one of the most popular and well known of all of the collections of the Buddhist saying.
And this evening, we’re going to have a look at two verses from the Dharma Vagga, the chapter on Dharma, verse number two hundred and sixty two and verse two hundred and sixty three. And these two verses make a rather interesting statement. They say, not by mere eloquence or beauty of form is one considered beautiful if he is jealous, selfish, or deceitful. But one in whom these things are destroyed, uprooted, extinct, and who has cast out hatred, that one is rightfully called beautiful. And I thought it would be interesting to talk about this or these two verses today because they concern a subject that I think is sometimes understood and misunderstood in Buddhism, and in fact in some other religious traditions also.
And this is the idea of the beautiful or the idea of beauty. It seems that the main misunderstanding of about beauty in Buddhism is that somehow or another beauty is a dangerous thing. It’s somehow related to craving. And wherever possible, you must fix your attention on old things, ugly things, dirty things, decrepit things, and as much as possible, turn your eyes away from anything that’s beautiful. Some people even think that if you’re a good Buddhist, you must look as ugly as possible.
For example, you must never smile. You must never wear makeup or or flowers or decorations or anything like that. Try your very best to look as ugly as you possibly can, and somehow or another, this will make you very spiritual. This is not a misunderstanding that applies only to Buddhism. In the West, the development of Puritan Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they had a fairly similar idea, that you must be very austere and unsmiling.
Churches or temples must be completely undecorated. Try to wear black wherever possible, the color of death, and try to be as cheerless and as unhappy as possible, and this will make you very profoundly spiritual. And as we’ll see from these two verses this evening, there seems to be a misunderstanding there. But, of course, this won’t be, as we will see, the only misunderstandings there are about beauty. Before we go on, we’ll actually have a look a little bit more carefully at this verse.
Not by mere eloquence or beauty of form. Here, first of all, the Buddha is speaking about eloquence, which is vākkharaṇa mattena, which means to speak beautifully. Eloquence is the style, the tone, and perhaps also even the content and the sound of your voice. So some people are very eloquent speakers in that they can weave together their words, their phrases in such a way that they sound very beautiful to the ear. Some people are eloquent speakers in the tone of their voice.
There was a great or a very famous, or perhaps I should say infamous Indian teacher who died only recently, who was famous for the beauty of his voice. It wasn’t just that the things he said were very clever and, in some cases, insightful, but the smoothness, the clarity of his voice was such that, certainly in my own case, having heard him, I was almost transfixed by the beauty of his speech. Okay? And then the Buddha goes on to talk about Vaṇṇa means color. And it can refer, in the ancient Indian context, to the color of your complexion.
So we talk about people as having a radiant complexion or a golden complexion or a clear complexion. Okay? The sort of thing that every woman wants to have, for example. Spend hundreds of millions, in fact, nowadays I think it is billions of dollars a year buying various products and what have you, which will not give them a clear complexion, but rather will restore and bring out their already existing clear complexion and their beauty. You don’t dye your hair anymore.
We don’t use that word. You bring out or highlight its natural beauty or its natural color. However, in the Indian context, when we’re talking about we’re talking about more than just the tone of your complexion. We are actually also talking about race. Because in India at the time of the Buddha, and indeed today, you have what’s known as the the four castes, or actually the four colors.
It was believed, and indeed in India today still people do believe, some people, that the high caste people are more pale and therefore more beautiful. They are a race apart. They are the superior color. And in fact, even today, if you go to India, people will spend a great deal of money trying to look as white as they possibly can, which is very interesting because India often sees itself as the leader of the third world, and perhaps rightly so, and there’s constant criticism in India of the terrible regime in South Africa. But in actual fact, there are few places in the world where people are so color conscious.
Black is ugly. White, pale, or as pale as possible, is beautiful. So if you read in The Statesman or The Hindu or any of these very good Indian newspapers, they have on the front, inside the front page, the marriage market about how you can buy a wife or what good looking young men are available to be married off. And sometimes nowadays they even say caste no bar, meaning if you’ve got enough money, we don’t really mind which caste you come from. But inevitably, they’ll always mention color.
She’s very pale. Or recently I saw one, dark skin, but a lot of money. So there you’ve gotta take your pick. Dark skin, that’s a bit of a disadvantage. On the other hand, she’s got a bit of money.
So there you have it, color is very important. And, of course, we’d be making a mistake if we thought that color consciousness was just a problem or just something that was considered important in India. Throughout the world, people have tended to think that me, being a different color from those people or from that race, I am superior to them. Okay? So here, when the Buddha is talking about beauty, varna, he’s talking about perhaps not just beauty of complexion and beauty of color, but perhaps also the belief that certain physical characteristics, a long nose or short nose or certain shaped eyes, that different races and groups of people have, that some of those may be more beautiful than others.
But here the Buddha is saying that despite what we normally think, beauty of voice and beauty of form doesn’t make you Subha. Sadhu — well, here in our society and Buddhists throughout the world, when they finish doing their devotional practice, the puja to the Buddha, they go sādhu, sādhu, sādhu. It means good, auspicious, wonderful. So here the word is vaṇṇa means form or shape. So subha vaṇṇa means auspicious shape.
Or to give it a less awkward English rendering, physical beauty. Okay? So voice, color, complexion, and the shape of the face, the Buddha says, doesn’t make you beautiful if you are and issā, or as they say in Sinhala, issā means jealousy. maccharī is selfishness. And sāṭheyya or sāṭho is craftiness, deceit, treachery.
Now, if you think about those qualities, there are quite a lot of mental characteristics which are not particularly attractive. For example, pride. We find pride in others, at least, to be a rather unattractive trait. We find talkativeness or narrow mindedness rather ugly traits, we might say, rather unattractive traits. But there are a few things that we would find as ugly, as unattractive, as unappealing as a jealous, selfish, crafty, and treacherous type of person, mainly because those particular qualities would have an effect upon us.
These are all projected qualities. So, for example, if I’m very proud, which I’m not, incidentally, but if I’m very proud, others may find that amusing, particularly if I’ve got nothing to be proud of. They might find that amusing. It doesn’t really affect others if I’m proud. But if I’m jealous, if I’m selfish, and if I’m a treacherous, cunning, and crafty person, this will immediately have an effect upon others.
So jealousy is a response to other people’s success or some goodness that they’ve done or some advantage that they enjoy. You’ve got something that I haven’t, and I feel jealous. Now, generally speaking, we don’t stop at simply feeling jealous. That affects how we act towards the person to whom we have the jealousy. Selfishness is exactly the same.
What could be worse than you’re standing on the side of the road waiting for a taxi, you’ve been there for ten minutes, you know what it’s like here in Singapore, somebody jumps in about ten feet further down the road and takes the taxi that you’ve been waiting half an hour for. Selfish people will do this. Selfishness is a lack of concern for others because of an overwhelming concern for oneself. There is what is called enlightened self interest. This is where we have what you might call a healthy self concern without necessarily causing inconvenience or distress for others.
But normally when we speak of a selfish person, we’re talking about somebody who creates difficulties or problems for others. They are so concerned about their own benefit that they act in a way that is detrimental to the benefit of others, and we find this unpleasant. And, of course, craft, deceit, and treachery. This is a terrible thing, too, because one thing that’s so important for human relationships is a degree of reliability and trustworthiness. One of the most wonderful things that you can have as far as social relationships are concerned are somebody that you can always trust, that you know will always be there for you in good times and bad, and so on and so forth.
Okay? That if you say to a person, look, I have to tell you this particular thing, I need somebody to talk to, and don’t tell anybody else, and they say, you can trust me, and you know that you can trust that person, then there’s a certain degree of predictability, and this gives us confidence. It gives us certainty in our relationships. Now, when you come across a deceitful or treacherous person, you trust them and they betray your trust. You rely upon them and you find out that they’re unreliable Despite all their proclamations, they’re treacherous, deceitful, and dishonest, this has a very detrimental effect upon us.
And thinking about these three things, they tend to go hand in hand, don’t they, don’t they? They’re three related defilements. A selfish person generally is jealous. And when we are jealous, we tend to want to undermine others. That requires a degree of treachery and dishonesty.
So the next question that these two verses raise is the idea of beauty. What is beauty? Now in Pali, we have many words for beauty,