For a bhikkhu who develops the path to nibbāna, going on house-to-house alms round is a helpful thing to strengthen his path of practice. When the bhikkhu goes on house-to-house alms round, in the village, so far-flung are houses that one house isn’t seeable from the other. The members of the household are engaged in farming activities. Poverty, saddhā, civility, willingness to offer alms, are prevalent in them.

One day when standing before a farmhouse in the hope of alms-food, a woman came out. She was young. A little kid, too, came scampering behind her. Perhaps she was a mother of one. What she brought in her hands was a sugar jar. Even that was half empty. She proffered two spoonfuls of sugar into the alms-bowl. All of a sudden she burst into tears. She whimpered. “Venerable Sir, this child’s father spends every penny earned on drinking. There’s just nothing in the house to offer,” she said in a piteous tone as she whimpered. Having dedicated merit to her, the venerable bhikkhu left.

A woman’s tears, whimpering, lovelorn emotions, husband’s neglect, the compassion a mother of one seeks, all this is food that Māra feeds you. It’s just Māra who was in tears before you under the guise of a mother of one. If you had thought, ‘Oh, poor thing. Since she has no food, the child has no milk either. Must give the kid something from the alms-bowl. Must bring biscuits or some such thing tomorrow and give…’; if you were to take pity on her suffering in this manner, whom you would have pitied thus was just Māra. In the future, Māra would make you a servant of a mother of one in a lay household.

Yet if you were a skilful one, you would think thus: she who cries before me is a woman, who, having wept due to lamentation, unrequited love and husband’s neglect when born as a woman, a deva maiden, a female peta-ghost and a female animal throughout immemorial saŋsāra, has inherited nothing but tears even on this occasion when a Buddha has emerged. What she seeks for is sympathy, compassion. What you seek for is extinguishment. To ask for pity or compassion means to ‘add’ something to oneself. To practise the path to enlightenment means to ‘let go’. You must let go of her tears, her sorrow. You must behold that the tear is intrinsic to the whimpering, and the child is intrinsic to a mother. All this is causality of karma-formations (saṅkhāra).

Having let go of everything, having gone forth from the lay household, one ordains to practise the path to emancipation not to pity the world. Nor to put out others’ suffering. But to extinguish the suffering in oneself. As you are proceeding on this journey, you will face instances where you must let go of even the loving-kindness, compassion, and sympathy. While developing loving-kindness and compassion for the rest of the world, you cannot penetrate enlightenment in this lifetime. You still haven’t escaped from the precariousness of being subject to dying, falling sick and ageing in the world. First you escape from this precariousness. Of course, those revered-folks who pursue the delusion there is happiness in saŋsāra, or believe there is still not enough pāramī, or wish for desirable destinations for rebirth, should develop more and more such qualities as loving-kindness and compassion, no question about it. Such folks should develop those qualities to the best of their ability. Look how reluctant beings are to hurt Māra’s feelings. They are wishing for nothing but Māra’s embrace. Māra’s embrace is ‘becoming’ (bhava). After having experienced billions of eons delighting in the warmth of Māra’s embrace breaking into tears and whimpering, even today you get greedy for the saŋsāra Māra points to; you keep putting off attaining extinguishment until the sāsana of the Metteyya Buddha. Dying and being reborn over and over again for tens of thousands of lifetimes over many more eons, if somehow you were to be born as a human being at the time the sāsana of the Metteyya Buddha will have emerged in the world, just like today, on that day, too, Māra would point you to the sāsana of the next Buddha-to-be. That, too, you would accept. It is having passed hundreds of thousands of dispensations of past Buddhas in the same way that Māra has led you here. Simply because of it, having made Māra’s warmth your body’s warmth, you inherited an ocean of suffering throughout immemorial saŋsāra. If you are to escape from the Māra who gave you such suffering, you needn’t ‘add’ anything to your life. What you need to do is ‘let go’ of everything. Look! Doing the difficult thing that is ‘adding’, you miss the easier thing called ‘letting go’. ‘Adding’ is Māra’s dhamma.[i] ‘Letting go’ is the world-transcendent dhamma. What would you like being? ―a son of Māra? ―or a son of the Buddha?

If what you do is ‘adding’, ‘accumulating’, and ‘piling up’, then you, too, are nothing but a son of Māra. Upon your death, at the Buddhist-funeral rites, hanging banners and competitively giving laudatory eulogies those puthujjana laity and clergy would canonize you enlightened.[ii] Wearing the faecal garlands of the puthujjana clergy and laity, you’ll end up having to take rebirth again. That can even be in the fourfold-hell; it can even be in the human realm or the heavenly realms. Wherever that may be, what is entailed in everyplace is nothing but suffering (dukkha).

You ought to be skilful to turn the alms round into a trip made to seek for ingredients necessary for developing the path to emancipation. If you were seeking only for food, then Māra would give you his blessing. For you are going in search of food for the sustenance of Māra’s existence. We can all develop loving-kindness towards the benefactor who offered alms. What you ought to do is not the thing everyone does but the thing everyone else cannot do. What everyone cannot do is develop loving-kindness towards the one who offers nothing. During the alms round, if you were skilful, you could attain to the samādhi of loving-kindness. If one goes on alms round seeking only for food, then what will be left unquenched in him is not the flame of hunger but the fire of ‘becoming’. If one were to put out the fire of ‘becoming’, then all the fires would be quenched. All we’ve done so far is stoke the fire with fuel. Although it is Māra who supplies fuel, it is you who burn from the fire. Fire’s nature is to blaze. Fuel’s nature is to help blaze. To add these two together is Māra’s nature. Your nature should be, without adding the fuel called ‘defilements’ to the fire of ‘becoming’, to extinguish the fire behind Māra’s back.

[i]  = adhamma (false dhamma)

[ii] That is to say, ‘would portray you enlightened’. ‘Canonize’ is meant figuratively.