About This Teaching
Ajahn Dtun tells of a Thai couple in their forties with two children in early high school. They planned to work hard and build up wealth first, then rest, visit temples and make merit after sixty. One day the husband was found to have a weakened major blood vessel and was taken for urgent surgery, but it ruptured as he was being wheeled in and he died. He later appeared to his wife in a dream and told her that their thinking had been wrong: there is a future life, and what follows us was very little.
Ajahn Dtun also mentions a student's nephew who died in a car accident at 23 without having come to the monastery or made merit. When the body breaks up, he explains, the balance of merit and demerit carries the mind to a good or unhappy destination, while the wealth we called ours passes to family and relatives.
His advice is not to be heedless: do a little if one has little, and do it gradually. Live in the world and do one's work and family duties as well as possible, while also building merit and practising the Dhamma, keeping worldly life and Dhamma together. He also encourages taking time to rest body and mind rather than thinking only of acquiring wealth.