..续本文上一页ave in another way. We should know the ins and outs because we live within conventions. Problems occur because people cling to them. If we suppose something to be, then it is. It”s there because we suppose it to be there. But if you look closely, in the absolute sense these things don”t really exist.

　　As I have often said, before we were laymen and now we are monks. We lived within the convention of "layman" and now we live within the convention of "monk." We are monks by convention, not monks through Liberation. In the beginning we establish conventions like this, but if a person merely ordains, this doesn”t mean he overcomes defilements. If we take a handful of sand and agree to call it salt, does this make it salt

　　 It is salt, but only in name, not in reality. You couldn”t use it to cook with. It”s only use is within the realm of that agreement, because there”s really no salt there, only sand. It becomes salt only through our supposing it to be so.

　　This word "Liberation" is itself just a convention, but it refers to that beyond conventions. Having achieved freedom, having reached liberation, we still have to use convention in order to refer to it as liberation. If we didn”t have convention we couldn”t communicate, so it does have its use.

　　For example, people have different names but they are all people just the same. If we didn”t have names to differentiate between them, and we wanted to call out to somebody standing in a crowd, saying, "Hey, Person! Person!", that would be useless. You couldn”t say who would answer you because they”re all "person." But if you called, "Hey, John!", then John would come, the others wouldn”t answer. Names fulfill just this need. Through them we can communicate, they provide the basis for social behavior.

　　So you should know both convention and liberation. Conventions have a use, but in reality there really isn”t anything there. Even people are non-existent! They are merely groups of elements, born of causal conditions, growing dependent on conditions, existing for a while, or control it. But without conventions we would have nothing to say, we”d have no names, no practice, no work. Rules and conventions are established to give us a language, to make things convenient, and that”s all.

　　Take money, for example. In olden times there weren”t any coins or notes, they had no value. People used to barter goods, but those things were difficult to keep, so they created money using coins and notes. Perhaps in the future we”ll have a new king decree that we don”t have to use paper money, we should use wax, melting it down and pressing it into lumps. We say this is money and use it throughout the country. Let alone wax, it may even happen that they decide to make chicken dung the local currency — all the other things can”t be money, just chicken dung! Then people would fight and kill each other over chicken dung! This is the way it is. You could use many examples to illustrate convention. What we use for money is simply a convention that we have set up, it has its use within that convention. Having decreed it to be money, it becomes money. 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 this.

　　This is convention, but to get ordinary people to understand liberation is really difficult. Our money, our house, our family, our children and relatives are simply conventions that we have invented, but really, seen in the light of Dhamma, they don”t belong to us. Maybe if we hear this we don”t feel so good, but in reality is like that. These things have value only through the established conventions. If we establish that it doesn”t have value, then it doesn”t have value. This is the way it is, we b…

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