U Aung Thein Myat - Great Personalities of Greatness

Dear friend,

(In person)

I moved to a new town near Yangon around January 1962. My land is 60 feet long and 40 feet wide.

Having moved from the cramped confines of Yangon, I was so happy when I got the chance to live in a spacious house plot. I filled the fence with pungent plants, and in other places, I planted mango, banana, guava, yam, yam, banana, jasmine, durian, durian-like trees, and coconut trees. I watered them constantly, and the surrounding area became pleasant with the lush plants.

By May, I was hoping that the rain would temporarily ease the burden of watering, but in June, July, August, and September, when the rains came, I was devastated.

Because the yard, which had been beautiful and spacious all winter and summer, was covered in water from the long rains and tides, and all the plants I had carefully tended to died.

Not only was the water in the house, but the trees were also dead. While I was feeling depressed, all kinds of ants, red worms, snakes, and other insects, all of which were searching for a place to hide and cling to, like a snake in a snake pit, flooded all the land and began to gather around my house, making it their happy place.

I have a newborn baby who is in poor health, so I spray ants with kerosene to kill them because I'm afraid they might harm the baby. I also kill snakes and snakes with a gravedigger's knife, with the help of my two children, a five-year-old and a three-year-old.

No matter how much you kill them, the snakes and snakes don't diminish. They keep coming. They keep coming.

And that's not all. Just as snakes are often found crawling in beds, snakes are also constantly found and killed under boxes, between pots, and between books. And so it goes on and on.

When the rains are over, I clear the entire yard and the ground under the house and plant trees. Then, when the next rain comes, insects, ants, and poisonous creatures keep coming, and our father and mother have to go back to their jobs as snake hunters and hunters.

Even though there is land to shelter in, the problem of insects, especially "centipedes" or "centipedes" coming to shelter in the house is getting worse.

Meanwhile, one fine evening, a major incident occurred.

That evening, I was in front of the house when I heard a loud crashing sound from behind. I ran to the front door and looked in the direction of the sound. I saw a snake slithering from between my legs, its legs moving under a row of clothes, and enter a nearby crevice in the ground.

In fact, my wife had a piece of trash and a rag on her leg. She thought that the cloth or trash had an ant in it and she just shook her leg without looking. She didn't even know that she had been bitten by a snake because I wasn't looking. I don't know what kind of bad situation would have happened if I hadn't looked out.

It was only when I told my wife that I saw a snake running in that she realized she had been bitten. She then advised me to run to the nearest clinic and get an injection, otherwise it would be best to go to the hospital if I didn't know if it was a good snake or a bad one.

He left behind a three-month-old baby, and his wife had to be hospitalized for medical treatment, which lasted for a week.

In this case, I noticed the strangeness of the snake that would emerge from the dirt and bite when there was no grass or trash to hide in the very clear ground.

One night, the landlady called out, "Get up, get up!" When she got up, she saw the landlady, wrapped in a diaper, next to the baby.

When he brought the diaper and threw it on the floor, he found a half-inch-wide, six-inch-long skunk, so he had to kick it with his heel and kill it. The next day, he cleaned the entire house by turning over mats, moving boxes, and so on. Even while he was killing, he found skunks hiding in the bushes and had to kill them again.

I didn't think there would be any more bugs since the whole house had been cleaned, but around midnight the landlady woke me up. When I looked up, I saw a five-inch long bug tangled in the landlady's hair. I picked it up with a pair of scissors and released it.

Why don't I, who am so crazy about killing and exterminating, kill those centipedes?

It's because a thought came to my head. My thought was

"Look, the bugs I've been wiping out so hard haven't diminished, they've only increased. There are so many places to hide. They're getting into my baby's diaper, their hair. I can't just abuse them like this anymore."

I am not far from the Three Jewels. I have taken refuge in the shadow of monks and received their teachings. There are also sutras and myths related to the worldly life. I have also read and studied the worldly life literature.

Therefore, if it cannot be driven away by force, then it can be driven away and protected by gentle means, and because I had heard and known the method of love and the method of Dhamma, I suddenly remembered this fact, and so I let go of that snake without killing it.

So the next day I searched the house for the “Great Book of Preeks”. However, I couldn’t find the specific Great Book of Preeks. I only found the “Ten Books” and when I read the Great Books one by one, I found the “Khandasuttha Preektaw”.

I explained the meaning of the Khandha Sutta to my eldest son and asked him to memorize it. I had him recite it about ten times so that he could read it, and then he had him memorize one verse a day.

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