Answer
by Venerable Dhattajeevo Bhikku
To say easily, knowledge is useful all year long and when we teach somebody something, that knowledge will not be gone. Do you see? Even this worldly knowledge about growing rice can give us rice throughout a whole year. But actually, human problems are not only about hunger, but there are 3 main problems, i.e.
1. Inability to understand the world; for example, the phenomenon in this world like thunder, lightning, landslide, etc. This is the worldly knowledge and experience.
2. Inability in sensing others’ wishes that causes us to be cheated and persecuted.
Therefore, when defilements force us, it can harm us in many ways like giving us greediness, anger and delusion. When we have bad thoughts, we will give bad speech and perform bad actions. The secret to get rid of these defilements were not found by anybody else in the world but our Lord Buddha. He knew that humans were born with defilements.
The main thing he taught was the knowledge and the way to conquer defilements in our minds which was called “Dhamma Dana” (The Gift of Dhamma). If we could conquer defilements, to understand the world and people was easy.
Because if defilements are all gone, we can see the whole world as clearly as seeing an orange in our palm, i.e. we can see the whole orange clearly and even can split it to see the inside.
The people who study well about the Lord Buddha’s teachings and train themselves real well by the teachings from wise people will soon understand the world and see the world as a toy or an orange in their hand.
The more defilements we get rid of, the more clearly we can see that all ruffians would actually like to be good, but the defilements in their minds are forcing them to act so badly that we cannot catch up on them.
But now we understand our own defilements, so we can also understand others’ and can understand what people think, but this thing is not as important as that we understand the teachings of the Lord Buddha through the gift of Dhamma that brighten our minds and can understand and conquer the defilements in our minds which are our minds’ diseases. It can be compared to viruses in computers. Understanding about Dhamma, we can conquer defilements. When we understand about our own defilements, we surely can understand other people since they are forced by defilements just like how we are.
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