..續本文上一頁uld simply foster your own defilements and make you known throughout the world in a way that the defilements would ridicule. Make yourself known instead for your virtue, concentration, and discernment, your conviction and persistence. Make yourself known for having striven to cure yourself or extricate yourself, to gain release from defilement and the mass of stress in the cycle of rebirth. This is what it means genuinely and directly to enhance your stature. Don”t abandon your efforts. Make it to the other shore of this turning, churning cycle in this lifetime -- which is much surer than any other lifetime, any other time or place.
And don”t forget, wherever you go: Don”t get involved in construction work. Everywhere we go these days, there”s construction work and monks involved in it. It”s enough to make you sick. As soon as they meet each other: ”How”s it going with your meeting hall
” ”How”s it going with your school
Are you finished yet
How much has it cost
” Whenever there”s a project, whatever the project, they go harassing lay people, gathering up funds, so that the lay people have to spend money and get embroiled too, without any respite. Let the lay people have enough money so that they can stash some of it away. They practically kill themselves just to scrape together a little cash, but instead of being able to use it to provide for their stomachs, for their families, their children, and other essentials, and for making merit at their leisure, they end up having to hand it all over to help the monks who harass them by fund-raising to the point where they”re left empty-handed. This is the religion of harassing the world, which the Buddha never practiced and never taught us to practice. So I want you all to understand this. The Buddha never acted this way. This is the religion of material objects, the religion of money, not the religion of Dhamma following the example of the Buddha.
Look around us: Monks” dwellings as large as Doi Inthanon. [3] How many stories do they have
They stretch up to the sky. How luxurious are they
How much do they make you sick to your heart
Even my own dwelling, I can”t help feeling embarrassed by it, even though I stay there against my will and have to put up with the embarrassment. They sent the money to build it without letting me know in advance. I”m ashamed of the fact that while I have asked for alms all my life, my dwelling... even a palace in heaven is no match for it, while the people who give alms live in shacks no bigger than your fist. What”s appropriate, what”s fitting for monks who are habitually conscious of danger, is to live wherever you can squeeze yourself in to sit and lie down. But as for your effort in the practice, I ask that you be solid and stable, diligent and persevering.
Don”t waste your time by letting any job become an obstacle, because exterior work, for the most part, is work that destroys your work at mental development for the sake of killing and destroying defilement. This is the major task in body and mind for monks who aim at release and feel no desire to come back to be reborn and die, to carry the mass of major and minor sufferings in levels of becoming and birth any more. There”s no danger greater than the danger of defilement smothering the heart, able to force and coerce the heart into suffering everything to which the Dhamma doesn”t aspire. There”s no suffering greater than the suffering of a person oppressed by defilement. If we don”t fight with defilement while we”re ordained, will we be able to fight with it after we die
The vagaries of life and the body are things we can put up with, but don”t put up with the oppression of defilement any longer, for that wouldn”t be at all fitting for monks who are disciples of the Tathagata.
Whether …
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