..续本文上一页eep treating it and your money keeps getting spent. As for the disease, it”s glad you”re fooled. There”s only one of it, but it comes in all sorts of disguises. Aging, illness, and death are very smart. They can keep us tied on a short leash so that we can never get away from them. People who don”t train their minds to enter the Dhamma are sure to miss this point, but those who train themselves to know the truth of the Dhamma will understand this principle of nature for what it is.
If we don”t realize the truth, we lose in two ways. On the one side we lose in terms of the world: We waste our money because we don”t realize what”s necessary and what isn”t, so we get worked up and upset all out of proportion to reality. On the other side, we lose in terms of the Dhamma because our virtue, concentration, and meditation all suffer. Illness makes us lose in these ways because we lack discernment. This is why the Buddha taught us to use our eyes. We live in the world, so we have to look out for our well-being in the world; we live in the Dhamma, so we have to look out for our well-being in the Dhamma. The results will then develop of their own accord. If we use discernment to evaluate things until we know what”s necessary and what”s not, the time won”t be long before we prosper in terms both of the world and of the Dhamma. We won”t have to waste money and time, and there won”t be any obstacles to our practice.
In other words, when you see that something is true, don”t try to get in its way. Let it follow its own course. Even though the mind doesn”t age, grow ill, or die, still the body has to age, grow ill, and die. This is a part of its nature that you can”t fight. When it gets ill, you take care of it enough to keep it going. You won”t be put to difficulties in terms of the world, and your Dhamma practice won”t suffer.
The suffering we feel because of these things comes from the cause of stress: delusion, ignorance of the truth. When the mind is deluded, it doesn”t know the cause of stress or the path to the disbanding of stress. When it knows, it doesn”t get caught up in the natural pain and stress of the body. Mental suffering comes from the accumulation of defilement, not from aging, illness, and death. Once the stillness of the path arises within us, then aging, illness, and death won”t unsettle the mind. Sorrow, despair, distress, and lamentation won”t exist. The mind will be separate. We can compare this to the water in the sea when it”s full of waves: If we take a dipperful of sea water and set it down on the beach, there won”t be any waves in the dipper at all. The waves come from wavering. If we don”t stir it up, there won”t be any waves. For this reason, we have to fix the mind so that it”s steady in its meditation, without letting anything else seep in. It will then gain clarity: the discernment that sees the truth.
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The mental state of the cause of stress leads us to pain; the mental state of the path leads us to happiness. If you don”t want stress or pain, don”t stay with the flow of their cause. Mental suffering is something unnatural to the mind. It comes from letting defilement seep in. Diseases arise in the body, but we let their effects spread into the mind. We have to learn which phenomena die and which don”t. If our defilements are thick and tenacious, there”ll be a lot of aging, illness, and death. If our defilements are thin, there won”t be much aging, illness, and death.
For this reason, we should build inner quality — awareness of the truth — within ourselves. However far the body is going to develop, that”s how far it”s going to have to deteriorate, so don”t be complacent. The important point is that you develop the mind. If the mind gets developed to a point of true maturity, it won t regress. In o…
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