This is a very welcome book, opening up the Dhammapada—the scripture that is a collection of sayings of the Buddha—because, although the Dhammapada is already rather short, we all need help understanding ancient texts.
Suffering as essential to life, is an essential tenet of Buddhism. Cuong Lu, an ordained Vietnamese monk at Plum Village in France, disciple of the late Thich Nhat Hanh, and teacher of Engaged Buddhism, has chosen 57 verses from the Dhammapada with which to explain the meaning of this.
As Cuong Lu writes in Chapter 14: “Suffering is inevitable, but it does not have to hurt so much.”
And if this feels morose, to focus so much on suffering, you need to see with more Buddhist eyes—because the idea is that one can never be happy without understanding what gets in the way of our happiness. And awakening and enlightenment come, also, only through a path of this kind of understanding.
Lu uses 33 short chapters to teach the meaning of the 57 verses. Each chapter begins with verses which are followed by what Lu calls a “Zen Key” paragraph of “pointing toward presence, freedom, and nonduality,” as he explains in the Prologue. This is followed by several paragraphs of “Reflection,” often using his own experience, teachings of Thay, and personal application to bring the lesson into human life.
