..续本文上一页d to degenerate.

　　Example (e): Alcohol. There is one who likes the drinking of alcohol. People who brew it complain of their difficulties: that it”s a losing business, that they”re afraid they”ll be seen by the police or cheated by their customers. People who drink alcohol complain that it makes them dizzy, or that it eats up their salaries and leaves them poor. I have yet to hear anyone extol drinking as a way to health, wealth, and happiness. If people who drink really thought it were good, they probably wouldn”t come back to drinking plain old water or eating plain old food again. Once people get drunk, they start acting rowdy and disgusting in ways that people in general neither praise nor admire. Even their own families get disgusted with them, and they themselves complain that they”re in debt or don”t have enough money to spend, which shows that they themselves don”t like or admire their habit.

　　In some places the government, acting out of concern for the public well-being, has established laws to prevent the damages that come from the drinking of alcohol. (I personally have wondered whether the money the government makes from taxing alcohol is enough to cover the damages caused by people who drink. I doubt that it is, but this is simply my own opinion. You might want to consider the matter for yourself. One common example is when people get together to drink — either legal whiskey or bootleg — and get to talking: One bottle of whiskey, and maybe one of them ends up killed. The pittance the government gets from the bottle of whiskey is probably nowhere near enough to pay for the costs of tracking down the guilty parties in a case like this.)

　　Thus the Buddha saw the evils in this sort of behavior: that it causes the world to degenerate and hampers people from making a living. A drunk person, for instance, can”t do any steady labor. All he can do is brag. I don”t mean to be critical here, but it”s something I”ve often seen. For instance, when a farmer has his neighbors over to help harvest his rice, they”ll make plenty of noise, but when you go to take a look at their work, you”ll find the rice scattered all over the place.

　　Once I came across a well dug at a crazy angle, but when I peered down at the water, it looked clean and fresh. So I said to the owner, "The water looks good. Why didn”t you do a good job of digging the well

　　 Was it because you ran into a rock

　　 Or a tree root

　　 When was it dug

　　 Who dug it

　　 Did you do it yourself, or hire someone to do it for you

　　"

　　So the owner answered, "I had some friends over to help dig it."

　　"How did you get them to dig so deep

　　 It must have cost a lot of money."

　　"I served whiskey until we were all good and drunk, and then we got down to digging the well, which is why it ended up so crooked."

　　This goes to show how liquor can spoil a job.

　　All of the examples I”ve mentioned here — brief, but enough to serve as food for thought — show that the world doesn”t like these things, that they cause damage and loss, putting money, labor and people to waste. And this goes to show that the Buddha forbade these things in line with the views of the world. Not one of the precepts runs counter to those views. This being so, which one of the precepts retards progress or creates trouble

　　Then why don”t people perceive this

　　 Because they haven”t associated with wise people, and so wrong looks right to them. They go counter to the world, and suffer for it. The Buddha taught in line with the aspirations of the world, for the progress of people and nations. If people were truly to abstain in line with the precepts, life on earth would be happy in the visible present.

　　This ends the discussion of the first topic, the benefits and drawbacks of observing and not observing the precepts.

　　2. The second quest…

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