them writes me a letter and tells me that things are
going badly. Conversely, I feel haunted by distaste
when I hear that things are going well for them.
There’s still the memory of how they hurt me, and I
wish they would just continue to go downhill and
drop dead, painfully. That’s how we seek others’ pain
as the limbs of our own happiness.
These slogans are a curious study of the human
species. They reveal that we need to be very honest
about what we do. Through seeing these things we
can begin to have a lot of compassion, because in
studying ourselves we’re studying the whole human
race. The monastic rules give us insight into what all
these saintly monks and nuns were like at the time of
the Buddha. There are rules like Don’t cover your
meat with rice so that the server will give you more
meat, thinking that you don’t have any. Don’t irritate
your roommate on purpose to get the person to leave
so that you’ll have the room to yourself. These are ac-
tually rules, the code for the monks and nuns coming
from the time of the Buddha.
All the cartoons in the world and all the funny
movies are made out of what this particular group of
slogans is saying. When we are doing things like this,
either we don’t see it or we do see it and feel as if
we’ve committed a sin, so we either zone out or make
a big deal: “I malign others. I’m not fit to live on this
earth. What a burden. The more I know myself, the
more I see. I’m just continually gossiping. There’s no
Taking Responsibility for Your Own Actions 163