..續本文上一頁 there really isn”t anything there. There isn”t even a person there! There”s just a set of natural conditions, born of their causal factors. They develop in dependence on causal factors, stay for a while, and before long they fall apart. You can”t stop that from happening. You can”t really control it. That”s all there is. It”s just a supposition, but without suppositions we”d have nothing to say: no names, no practice, no work, no language. Suppositions and conventions are established to give us a language, to make things convenient, that”s all.

　　Take money, for example. In the past there wasn”t any paper money. Paper was just paper, without any value. Then people decided that silver money was hard to store, so they turned paper into money. And so it serves as money. Maybe someday in the future a new king will arise who doesn”t like paper money. He”ll have us use wax droppings instead—take sealing wax, melt it, stamp it into lumps, and suppose it to be money. We”ll be using wax droppings all over the country, getting into debt all because of wax droppings. Let alone wax droppings, we could take chicken droppings and turn them into money! It could happen. All our chicken droppings would be cash. We”d be fighting and killing one another over chicken droppings.

　　Even when they propose new forms for things, if everybody agrees to the new supposition, it works. As for the silver we started out with, nobody really knows what it is. The ore that we call silver, is it really silver

　　 Nobody knows. Somebody saw what it was like, came up with the supposition of “silver,” and that”s what it was. That“s all there is to the affairs of the world. We suppose something into being, and that”s what it is—because we live with suppositions. But to turn these things into release, to get people to know genuine release: That”s hard.

　　Our house, our money, our possessions, our family, our children, our relatives are ours simply on the level of supposition. But actually, on the level of the Dhamma, they”re not really ours. We don”t like to hear this, but that”s the way they actually are. If we don”t have any suppositions around them, they have no value. Or if we suppose them to have no value, they have no value. But if we suppose them to have value, they do. This is the way things are. These suppositions are good if we know how to use them.

　　Even this body of ours isn”t really ours. We just suppose it to be so. It”s a supposition. If you try to find a genuine self within it, you can”t. There are merely elements that are born, continue for a while, and then die. Everything is like this. There”s no real, true substance to it, but it”s proper that we have to use it.

　　For example, what do we need to stay alive

　　 We need food. If our life depends on food as its nourishment, as a support we need to use, then we should use it to achieve its purpose. That”s how the Buddha taught new monks. Right from the very beginning he taught the four supports: clothing, food, shelter, medicine. He taught that we should contemplate these things. If we don”t contemplate them in the morning, we should contemplate them in the evening after we”ve used them.

　　Why does he have us contemplate them so often

　　 To realize that as long as we”re alive we can”t escape these things. “You”ll use these things all your life,” he said, “but don”t fall for them. Their purpose is just to keep life going.”

　　If we didn”t have these things, we couldn”t meditate, couldn”t chant, couldn”t contemplate. For the time being, we have to depend on these things, but don”t get attached to them. Don”t fall for the supposition that they”re yours. They”re supports for keeping you alive; when the time comes, you”ll have to give them up. In the meantime, though, even though the idea that they”re yours is just a s…

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