..續本文上一頁her countries far away. You can learn a lot, and I feel very thankful to those who create such programs so we can learn without having to go out a lot. But I also observe that there are many bad television programs, and when we look at these programs we receive a lot of poisons, as when we eat something that is not healthy, we get poisons in our stomach, and we get sick. So television is a kind of food, and we have to be careful, we have to be very mindful when consuming television. You know that if you consume edible food unmindfully, you can get sick, you might have diarrhea and other things. The same thing happens when you consume television without mindfulness. There is a lot of fear, violence, craving, suspicion, and hatred in many programs, and if we allow ourselves to be penetrated by these poisons we will not have good mental health. I think that people who have depression have watched a lot of television and have gotten in touch with a lot of negative things in their daily life, and that is why they get sick mentally. That is why our practice is to be mindful in consuming edible food, and television. So I wish that today you will have a Dharma discussion and continue the discussion in the opinion line. I would like to hear from you, after your Dharma discussion, about your determination of how to use your television set.

　　I learned that in North America many people are enlightened concerning smoking. They know that smoking is not good for their health. That is why many people in North America have stopped smoking. Not many people in my country have stopped smoking. I am very sad about that, and I would like the people in my country to stop smoking. Many people get sick because of smoking, because of nicotine. About ten or fifteen years ago, every time I took the train or the bus or the airplane, I was very afraid of sitting close to someone who smoked. I suffered a lot because of the cigarette smoke. But now there are air companies that offer us non-smoking flights. That”s wonderful. There are many non-smoking flights, even in France. I think there must be many of us who have been working silently and continuously in order to increase awareness that smoking is hazardous to our health. It is wonderful to see on every package of cigarettes in America that wonderful sentence: "Be aware—smoking may be hazardous to your health." An awakening, enlightenment on the dangers of smoking, has been made into law. If you produce cigarettes, you have to put that label on each package of your cigarettes; otherwise it would be against the law. That is why I think our American friends have been wonderful in working on that aspect of enlightenment, so that mindfulness regarding smoking has become daily life.

　　We have to step up our efforts regarding other aspects of our daily life. I would like to urge that our American friends do something similar with television sets. I wish that someday, when we go to buy a TV set, we will see stuck on each TV set the same kind of sentence: "Be aware—if you are not mindful, this can be very toxic, and can bring you a lot of suffering." This is our practice, mindfulness of consuming. When we sit around a table, about to eat our dinner or lunch, we should have enough time to practice breathing in and breathing out, and to look deeply into the food that we are going to eat, to see whether this food contains poisons or toxins. There are many kinds of food that are not good for us, and if we eat them, we”ll suffer later on. It may be half an hour later, it may be two hours later. That is why before eating something you have to practice mindfulness of breathing and look deeply to see whether the food is good for you or not. The food might be okay for other people, but for you it”s not good. That”s why you h…

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