“Almost everything we use – from our food to our requisites
to the robes we wear – must pass through various stages
of preparation before being turned into useful items. Rice
must be planted, harvested, and cooked; wood must be
cut, sawed, and planed; and cloth must be woven and sewn
into robes. Isn’t that right? These things don’t become fin-
ished products ready for use or consumption unless a lot of
work is done on them. Food and shelter are the product of
man’s labor. They do not simply materialize from nowhere.
Only corpses are totally inactive, lying lifeless and having
no need to provide for their own livelihood. With no reason
to adjust their behavior, they have no need for a teacher to
scold them and give instructions. But you are alive and still
seeking a teacher’s guidance. Yet you’re unreasonably afraid
of your teacher, citing his fierce admonitions as a ration-
ale. Then again, if your teacher simply kept his mouth shut,
you would probably accuse him of failing to teach you and
thus be even more upset. In the final analysis, nothing quite
suits you. Your thoughts jump around like a monkey jump-
ing up and down in the trees. If it keeps jumping about
long enough, it will jump on a rotten branch and end up
in a heap on the ground. Which do you want to be? Do
you want to be a monkey jumping on a rotten branch, or a
monk with a teacher to guide you?”Sometimes, he confronted the culprit directly, motivating him
to become more mindfully aware of his own thoughts. At other
times, he simply made some oblique, sarcastic reference to a monk’s
thoughts. The objective in either case was to warn a student that