|
was incorrect.
It's rare to hear the admonition, "You are not taking care of it like it's your own monastery." Whenever he comes on problems like this, his pat expression is, "They don't have the family spirit." He wants his students to have family spirit. He doesn't want them shirk their responsibility. He wants them to take care in all things. In accord with the saying, "A responsible person is one who know his responsibility", he wants them to have a sense of responsibility. He would rather one do something on one's own than because one was told to. He appreciates it when people take care of things on their own more than when they have to be told to. The father of the Shwe Taung Gon Sâsana Yeiktha is Sayadaw. The mother of the Shwe Taung Gon Sâsana Yeiktha is also Sayadaw. Sayadaw takes the place of the parents. The students are Sayadaw's sons and daughters. Parents take responsibility for whatever issues come up in the family. Yet the children are not free of responsibility. They have to take care of things with a sense of responsibility. At the Shwe Taung Gon Sâsana Yeiktha, too, Sayadaw takes most of the responsibility for whatever issues arise. It's not that the students don't take responsibility. They do. Rather, he who has the greatest sense of responsibility takes the greatest amount of responsibility.
When Sayadaw came back from the most recent trip abroad, he had an article with him. That article was laminated. He didn't seem to have many very many of these laminated articles. It don't think it was more than a few. He gave the author one to show to the novices and young nuns in the Buddhist Culture Course. Handing it to me, he said "Try reading it. What do you think it means?" It had a cartoon in it. In the cartoon, an infant lay in a puddle of blood, dying. Next to him was a gun and some ammunition. Among the group who stood by his side watching were his parents, his schoolteachers, and a policeman. They were all asking each other, "Who's responsible for this child's death?" Nobody said it was their responsibility.
The heading on that article read, "Who is responsible?" The moral of the cartoon is that all of them were responsible for the child's death. What Sayadaw wanted his students to understand from that cartoon is that we must have family spirit in dealing with every issue.
When we become successful in something, we want to take pride in our accomplishment saying, "I gained success all by myself". We want to get a good name. We want to be noted. We want to say, "I did it all on my own", to show our heroism. We want to grandstand. Then, perhaps our success in that area comes to an end. When there is a fault, we want to evade responsibility. We want to point to this person and that one. We want to say, "That's his fault". We don't want to say, "it's my fault." We usually fault others. We absolve ourselves of responsibility. Some act deceitfully to turn their own responsibility into another's. We often implicate others. We often have the attitude, "No matter who has to die, as long as I am free of blame, as long as I am healthy, it is enough". To deceive, we spout falsehoods like water, without hesitation. We tell lies easily.
|
|