Gathering And Collecting

To practice wholesomeness we need to make an effort to do well in the here and now and then to repeat it again and again, or to gather wholesomeness and collect it from one moment to the next. It is like experience which we need to gather and collect. It is as in our lives when we reach maturity because we have travelled through or collected a lot of experience. There is a story which was told by Ajahn Jayasaro which gives a good example of this. Here is the story:

One day a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law went to collect mushrooms at the foot of a mountain which they had been told was rich in mushrooms. Along the way, there was the occasional mushroom. So the mother-in-law collected them one by one. The daughter-in-law, however, ignored them, thinking, "Why does mother-in-law take the trouble to collect mushrooms one by one like this? She can wait and collect them all at the foot mountain where there will be far more to collect." When her mother-in-law asked her to collect mushrooms along the way, she said what she had been thinking. So only the mother-in-law collected mushrooms along the way. When they arrived at the foot of the mountain, the mother-in-law’s basket was full of mushrooms. But the basket of the daughter-in-law was empty because she had thought that she would collect mushrooms at the foot of the mountain. Unfortunately, that day they were late. There weren’t any mushrooms left for them as other people had collected them all. The mother-in-law was not bothered as she had already collected her mushrooms one by one along the way so her basket was full. She felt relieved that she had something to eat. The daughter-in-law, on the contrary, had nothing, as she thought that she would have done her collecting at the foot of the mountain. Unfortunately there was nothing left for her to collect.

The moral of this story: perform wholesome acts one by one in the here and now as we need to collect them. We cannot expect opportunities to arise in the future, only make use of what is happening here and now in the present. The same is true for the past and the future. What you can do now, just do it! We should not postpone things by saying, "I will do it in the future", because the future is impermanent.

Here and now is the most precious place and time which we must focus our attention on. Otherwise, we will be lost.