..续本文上一页arts are like devas — so sweet and good-tempered that other people can curse our mother and grandmother and we won”t get mad. Then there are other times when there”s no call for anger and yet we manage to get angry in really ugly, nasty ways. That”s the way it is with these consciousnesses: all very confused and confusing, and they come seeping into our bodies. That”s how you should look at things.

　　There”s yet another group of consciousnesses: the ones who have come to collect old kamma debts. They”re the germs that eat away at our flesh — at our nose, our ears — to ruin our looks. They eat away at our lower lip, exposing our teeth, making us embarrassed and ashamed. Sometimes they eat away at one of our ears, or eat away at our nose all the way up to the forehead. Sometimes they eat at our eyes, our hands, our feet. Sometimes they eat away at our whole body, making our skin diseased. These are kamma debt collectors. In the past we made life miserable for them, so this time around they”re ganging up to make us squirm. The one”s that are really easy to see are the worms that help eat the food in our intestines. In the past we probably ate their flesh and skin, so this time around they”re going to eat ours. They eat, eat, eat — eat everything. "Whatever you”ve got, you bastard, I”m going to eat it all." That”s what they say. How are we ever going to get rid of them

　　 They eat our outsides where we can see them, so we chase them away and they go running inside, to eat in our stomach and intestines. That”s when it really gets bad: we can”t even see them, and they”re even harder to get rid of. So they keep making us squirm as they keep eating, eating away: eating in our intestines, eating in our stomach, eating our kidneys, our liver, our lungs, eating in our blood vessels, eating our body hairs, eating everything all over the place. They eat outside and turn into skin diseases. They eat inside as worms and germs. And they themselves get into fights — after all, there are lots of different gangs in there. Even just the worms have 108 clans. So when there are so many of them, they”re bound to quarrel, creating a ruckus in our home. How can we ever hope to withstand them

　　 Sometimes we fall in with them without realizing it. How can that happen

　　 Because there are so many of them that we can”t resist.

　　These living beings in our body: Sometimes they get angry and get into fights. Sometimes they run into one another on the street and start biting and hitting each other, so that we itch in front and itch in back — scritch scritch, scratch scratch: The worms have gotten into a gang war. They cruise around in our body the way we do outside. The blood vessels are like roads, so there are little animals cruising down the blood vessels. This one comes this way, that one comes that, they meet each other and start talking. Sometimes they have real conversations that know no end, so they spend the night there, eating right there and excreting right there until a swelling starts: That”s a little shack for the beings, the consciousnesses in our body. This is how things keep happening.

　　Our body is like a world. Just as the world has oceans, mountains, trees, vines, land, so it is with the body. Each blood vessel is a road for living beings. They travel down our blood vessels, down our breath channels. Some vessels get closed off, like a dead end road. Others stay open. When they”re open, the blood flows, the breath flows, like the water in rivers and streams. When they flow, boats can travel along them. When there are boats, there are beings in the boats. Sometimes the boats crash into each other. That”s why we have aches and pains in our legs and arms and along our breath channels. So go ahead: keep rubbing them and massaging them — it”s all an affai…

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