The Treasures of the Dhamma

　　The treasures of the world last only as long as our breathing. As soon as we die, they go to somebody else. The King of Death keeps changing our clothes — our eyes, our hair, our skin, etc. — as a way of forewarning us that we”re going to be evacuated to another country. If we don”t get our provisions ready, we”re going to be in trouble when the evacuation order comes.

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　　This body that we”ve borrowed from the world: The original owners keep coming to take it back bit by bit without our realizing it. For example, the hair on our head: They take it back one or two strands at a time, turning it gray. Our eyes they take back one at a time, making them blurry. Our ears they take back bit by bit as our hearing starts to go. Our teeth they take back one by one. A tooth will start feeling loose, then it stops for a while, and then it starts growing loose again. Eventually it whispers to the dentist to take all the teeth out. The original owners also cut away our flesh bit by bit as our muscles atrophy and our skin gets loose and wrinkled. Our spine they keep coming to pull forward until it”s so bent that we can”t straighten up. Some people end up having to crawl or to walk with a cane, stumbling and swaying, falling down and picking themselves back up, a sorry sight to see. Ultimately, the owners come and call for the whole thing back, in what we call "death."

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　　If you look carefully at the body, you”ll see that what you have here is the four states of deprivation, nothing wonderful at all.

　　The first state of deprivation is the animal kingdom: all the worms and germs that live in our stomach and intestines, in our blood vessels, and in our pores. As long as there”s food for these things to eat in there, they”re always going to be with us, multiplying like crazy, making us ill. On the outside of the body there are fleas and lice. They like staying with whoever doesn”t keep himself clean, making his skin red and sore. As for the animals living in the blood vessels and pores, they give us rashes and infections.

　　The second state of deprivation is the kingdom of hungry ghosts, i.e., the properties of earth, water, fire, and wind in the body. First they feel too cold, then too warm, then they feel ill, then they want to eat this or that. We have to keep pandering to them, running around to find things for them to eat with no chance to stop and rest. And they never have enough — like the hungry ghosts who starve after they die, with no one to feed them. These properties keep pestering you, and no matter what you do, you can never please them. First the food is too hot, so you have to put ice in it. Then it”s too cold, so you have to put it back on the stove. All of this comes down to an imbalance in the properties, sometimes good, sometimes bad, never coming to a stable state of normalcy at all, making us suffer in various ways.

　　The third state of deprivation is the land of angry demons. Sometimes, when we get ill or lose our senses, we run around naked without a stitch of clothing, as if we were possessed by angry demons. Some people have to undergo operations, getting this removed or cutting out that or sucking out this, waving their arms and moaning in a way that”s really pitiful. Some people get so poor that they have nothing to eat; they get so thin that they”re all eyeballs and ribs, suffering like the angry demons who can”t see the brightness of the world.

　　The fourth state of deprivation is purgatory. Purgatory is the home of the spirits with a lot of bad kamma who have to suffer being roasted, speared with red-hot iron spikes, and pierced with thorns. All the animals whose flesh we”ve eaten, after they”ve been killed and cooked, gather together in our stomach and then disappear into our body in hu…

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