..续本文上一页born until their parents send them for formal schooling. The principles of nature are everywhere, so that anyone who is interested -- child or adult -- can study them at any time, unlike formal studies and book learning, which come into being at some times and change or disappear at others. For this reason, parents are the most influential mould for their children in the way they look after them, give them love and affection, and provide their education, both in the principles of nature and in the basic subjects that the children should pick up from them. This is because all children come ready to learn from the adults and the other children around them. Whether they will be good children or bad depends on the knowledge they pick up from around them. When this is stored up in their hearts, it will exert pressure on their behavior, making it good or bad, as we see all around us. This comes mainly from what they learn of the principles of nature, which are rarely taught in school, but which people pick up more quickly than anything that school-teachers teach.

　　Thus parents and teachers should give special attention to every child for whom they are responsible. Even when parents put their children to work, helping with the buying and selling at home, the children are learning the livelihood of buying and selling from their parents -- picking up, along the way, their parents” strong and weak points. We can see this from the way children pick up the parents” religion. However good or bad, right or wrong the religion may be -- even if it”s worshipping spirits -- the children are bound to pick up their parents” beliefs and practices. If the parents cherish moral virtue, the children will follow their example, cherishing moral virtue and following the practices of their parents.

　　This third sort of person is thus very industrious and hard-working, and so reaps better and more outstanding results than the other two sorts.

　　When we classify people in this way, we can see that people of the first sort are the laziest and most ignorant. At the same time, they make themselves disreputable and objects of the scorn of good people in general. People of the second sort are fairly hard-working and fairly well-off, while those of the third sort are determined to be wealthier than the rest of the world and at the same time are very hard-working because, since they have set their sights high, they can”t just sit around doing nothing. They are very persevering and very persistent in their work, going all out to find ways to earn wealth, devoting themselves to their efforts and to being ingenious, circumspect, and uncomplacent in all their activities. People of this sort, even if they don”t become millionaires, are important and deserve to be set up as good examples for the people of the nation at large.

　　We monks fall into the same three sorts. The first sort includes those who are ordained only in name, only as a ceremony, who don”t aim for the Dhamma, for reasonability, or for what”s good or right. They aim simply at living an easy life because they don”t have to work hard like lay people. Once ordained, they become very lazy and very well-known for quarreling with their fellow monks. Instead of gaining merit from being ordained, as most people might think, they end up filling themselves and those around them with suffering and evil.

　　The second sort of monk aims at what is reasonable. If he can manage to gain release from suffering, that”s what he wants. He believes that there is merit and so he wants it. He believes that there is evil, so he wants really to understand good and evil. He is fairly hard-working and intelligent. He follows the teachings of the Dhamma and Vinaya well and so doesn”t offend his fellow monks. He is interested in study…

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