Another quote from the same:
Related to that - a quote from the book which is the topic of this thread (by some bhikkhu mentioned there):Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:When he taught his young son, Rahula, about truthfulness, the teaching was also pretty harsh. If you feel no shame in telling a lie, he said, your goodness is empty. It's thrown away. You can't be trusted. Then he taught Rahula to apply truthfulness in looking at his actions, to learn from his actions. That is basically what it means to become an adult.
Judging from what I have read so far, I do not think that the book is overly biased. It does seem to give quite a realistic account of what happens when people are insincere, hungry for holiness and "attainments" and all such things and their reputation, but cannot handle it and sacrifice their honesty. When such development becomes commonplace it is hard to stop."It is useless to practice in Pā-Auk, since Sayādaw cannot read my mind. He just gave me the instructions according to what I provide, even when I was lying."
This book is a warning. As for its "inflammatoriness", one should be careful not to read it with an inflammatory mindset, I guess.
We should not be sad, or angry. Today it often seems we have "too much information", more than we actually want to know. Must be some kind of bad karma for us.
Thanks for sharing."Gotami, the qualities of which you may know, 'These qualities lead to passion, not to dispassion; to being fettered, not to being unfettered; to accumulating, not to shedding; to self-aggrandizement, not to modesty; to discontent, not to contentment; to entanglement, not to seclusion; to laziness, not to aroused persistence; to being burdensome, not to being unburdensome': You may categorically hold, 'This is not the Dhamma, this is not the Vinaya, this is not the Teacher's instruction.'