..续本文上一页t these days is money. They think that if they just get enough of it, everything will be all right. So they spend all their time looking for money. They don”t look for goodness. This is like wanting meat, but not wanting salt to preserve it. You just leave the meat around the house to rot. Those who want money should know not only how to find it, but also how to look after it. If you want meat, you can”t expect to buy it and then just leave it lying around the house. It”ll just go rotten. Goodness arises from a cause. Whenever we create good actions, goodness arises in the mind. If we understand causes in this way, we can create those causes and the results will naturally follow. But people don”t usually create the right causes. They want goodness so much and yet they don”t work to bring it about. This kind of thinking is wrong, and the result of wrong thinking is rotten results - just turmoil and confusion.
Meat Between Your Teeth
It”s hard to give up sensual pleasure. Consider sensual pleasure like eating some meat which gets stuck between your teeth. When you get it out, you feel some relief for a while. Maybe you even think that you won”t eat any more meat. But when you see it again, you can”t resist it. You eat some more and it gets stuck, you have to pick it out again, which gives some relief once more, until you eat some more meat. That”s all there is to it. Sensual pleasures are just like this. When the meat gets stuck in your teeth, there”s discomfort. You take a toothpick and pick it out and experience some relief. There”s nothing more to it than this with sensual desire.
Millipede
If many people live together, as we do here in the monastery, they can still practice comfortably if their views are in harmony. It”s not true to say that there will be disharmony just because there are many of us. Just look at a millipede. A millipede has many legs, doesn”t it
Just looking at it you”d think it would have difficulty walking, but actually it doesn”t. It has its own order and rhythm. In our practice it”s the same. If we practice properly, even if we number in the hundreds or thousands, no matter how many we are, we will live in harmony.
Millipede and Chicken
Westerners are very "clever" and can”t accept many principles of Dhamma. I once asked some learned people if they had ever seen a millipede. It has many legs, but how fast can it run
Can it outrun a chicken
No! Yet a chicken has only two legs. How come this animal with so many legs can”t even keep up with a chicken
Money, Wax, and Chicken Dung
Rules and conventions are established to make things more convenient, that”s all. Let”s take money, for example. In olden times, people used materials and goods to barter as money. But they were difficult to keep, so they started to use coins and notes. Perhaps in the future we”ll have a new royal decree saying only lumps of wax can be used as money throughout the country, or chicken dung. Then people would start fighting and killing each other over wax or chicken dung. This is just the way it is. What we use for money is simply a convention that we have set up. It is money because we have decided it to be so, but in reality what is money
Nobody can say. When there is a popular agreement about something, then a convention comes about to fulfill the need. The world is just conventions.
But it is difficult to get ordinary people to understand this. Our money, house, family, our children and relatives are simply conventions that we have invented, and we really believe they are all ours, but seen in the light of Dhamma, they don”t belong to us. It”s when we think that they do that we suffer.
Monkey
When we know that it is the nature of the mind to be constantly changing, we will understand it. We have to know …
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