Not be a destroyer of those dream palaces but a builder

 

If you are a learned and intelligent scholar, you should first examine whether you have those qualities in yourself before you tie the knot. Similarly, the Buddha, the Great, preached in history two thousand five hundred years ago that the liberation that each of us can obtain through the education we have received or through the acquisition of land and money is temporary. All the things he preached with the aim of guiding all the misguided beings to the right path are timeless. However, due to the emergence of a society that chases money, what do people do today? What should they do? They live their lives as helpless and miserable people who know but do not know the facts.

The Buddha preached in the "Alagaddupama" sutta that if you catch a snake by the tail and know that it will bite you, do you do the same? But we should examine ourselves whether people who do so knowingly live happily on the social plane. The Buddha used the example of a snake to preach that people should not do so even though they know that their actions are sinful. The disaster that will occur if they do so should also be well understood from the above example. However,

The social plane in which each of us lives is like a swamp. It is a common Dharma. Let us look at a lotus flower as an example. It grows at the bottom of the dirty water where snails, worms, and squids live and blooms, pleasing the eyes and hearts of all beings to worship the Buddha. It has no defects or odor. Even though it blooms in mud, it is the same. The Buddha was also born as a small baby in a society where educated people do not know why they were born. Why did he, having endured all the fun and games that he had to do in his childhood and all the pleasures that he had to enjoy in his secular life, abandon all pleasures out of frustration and seek out the true truth, the true truth or the path to liberation, and make it known to every living being in the world? Was it for the sake of material wealth and comfort? Was it for the sake of offerings, offerings, care, and respect? No. It was because all living beings were searching for the path to solace, suffering, and helplessness. So why are the high-minded people living in this world unable to do so? That is a question that we must ask ourselves. What do we experience as happiness? Everyone should receive good training from a young age to understand all this. Just as one tries to make the fields fertile by crossing the flowing streams or to fulfill one's various desires, one should live this life that one has acquired properly with the aim of providing liberation for oneself and others. If one is to be a builder of dream palaces, one should not be a destroyer of those dream palaces but a builder of the dream palaces that one has created.