A Builder

This story is old but it contains good teaching:

There was an old builder who was a very good workman. One day he told his boss that he wanted to stop working because he was old. He wanted to spend his time with his wife and grand children. He said that he would miss the high salary, but he had to stop it. His boss also did not want to lose him because he did a good job. Then the boss asked him to do one last job, building a house. He said “yes, I will do it for you.”

After that, he started building a house, and not long before the house was finished, it was found that the house was under standard. This was not the standard of this builder. When the work was inspected, the boss gave him a key and said, “This house is for you, I give it to you as a present.” When the builder heard that, he was shocked and said to himself, “How embarrassing, if I had known that this house was for me, I would have made it better than this.”

The moral of this story:
We are like the builder, and our lives are like houses. We are building our lives, and we have to live in whatever we have been building. We have to choose good quality equipment and tools now, so we will not repent later, like the builder in the story. It is like saying, “Life is what we create by ourselves”, it should be built with intelligence and skill, not with ignorance or desire; greed, hatred, and delusion. Remember, “Work as well as possible at the present, so that you will not know the word, ‘repent’ ”.