..续本文上一页 with. Then they keep thinking along these lines until they can take a faraway object and make it appear up close. The people who get these things started tend to be military strategists. They”re the ones who usually get these ideas first. Another important branch of science is medicine. People in both these branches have to think deeper than people in general.

　　For example, people in ships out at sea got it into their heads that they”d like to see the ships approaching them from a distance. "How can we see them

　　 How can we get their image to appear in our ship

　　" They worked on this idea until they succeeded. First they started out really simple-minded, just like us. Simple-minded in what way

　　 They thought like a mirror, that”s all, nothing special. They put a mirror up high on a mast and then had a series of mirrors pick up the image in the first mirror and send it on down into the ship. They didn”t have to look in the first mirror. They could look at a little tiny mirror down in the ship and see ships approaching from far away. That”s all they used in the beginning. After a while they made a single mirror in waves. When an image hit the top wave, the next wave picked it up and sent it on down the waves of the mirror into the ship. They kept thinking about this until now, no more: They have radar, a tiny little box that doesn”t use a series of mirrors, and doesn”t use a mirror in waves, but can still pull the image of a faraway ship and make it appear in your ship. This is how knowledge develops to a high level in the sciences.

　　As for medicine, doctors these days are researching into how they can keep people from dying. Lots of people are doing the research, but no one has found the solution. No matter how much research they do, people are still dying. They haven”t succeeded in making people live longer than their ordinary span. This is another branch of knowledge that comes from thinking, and not from textbooks.

　　And there”s still another branch that”s moving even further out, but how far they”ll get is hard to say. These are the people who want to go and live on Mars. It must be really nice up there. But the chances of their succeeding are small. Why are they small

　　 Because the people aren”t really sincere. And why aren”t they sincere

　　 Because they”re still unsure and uncertain. The idea isn”t really clear in their heads. This uncertainty is what gets in the way of success.

　　So this is the second level of worldly knowledge, the level that comes from thinking and ideas, or cintamaya-pañña.

　　But in the final analysis, neither of these two levels of knowledge can take us beyond suffering and stress. They”re the type of knowledge that creates bad kamma about 70 percent of the time. Only 30 percent of the time do they actually benefit the human race. Why only 30 percent

　　 If another war gets started: total disaster. The kinds of knowledge that are really useful, that give convenience to human transportation and communication, are few and far between. For the most part, worldly knowledge is aimed at massive killing, at amassing power and influence. That”s why it doesn”t lead beyond suffering and stress, doesn”t lead beyond birth, aging, illness, and death.

　　Take, for instance, the countries at present that are clever in building all kinds of weapons. They sell their weapons to other countries, and sometimes those other countries use the weapons to kill people in the countries that built them. There are countries that can”t build their own weapons, yet they declare war on the countries who gave them military aid. That”s about as far as the results of worldly knowledge can take you.

　　This is why the Buddha taught us a higher level of knowledge: Dhamma knowledge. Dhamma knowledge arises in two ways, through thinking and th…

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