“Whether we’re happy or sad, feel pleasure or pain, cry or sing, as long as we’re in this world, these things happen in a cage. We don’t escape from the cage. Even if we’re wealthy, we’re in a cage. If we’re poor, we’re in a cage. If we cry, we’re in a cage. If we dance, we’re dancing in a cage. Which cage?

The cage of birth, aging, illness, and death.

It’s like a mourning dove we keep in our home. We simply listen to its song and we praise it. “How pretty, the sound of my dove! My dove has a low voice. My dove has a high voice”—that sort of thing. We never ask the dove if it’s enjoying itself or not. We give it rice to eat and water to drink, but everything is in the cage. And yet we think that the dove is satisfied.

Have we ever stopped to think: If someone gave us rice and water and put us in a cage, would we be happy? In the same way, we’re caged in this world. “This is mine, I have this, I have that”—all kinds of things. But we don’t understand our own condition. Actually, we’re gathering stress and suffering into ourselves because we don’t look deeply into ourselves, in the same way that we don’t look deeply into the dove. It looks like it’s living comfortably. It can drink water and eat food, and we think that it’s happy. The same with us: Even though we live in extreme pleasure and comfort, once we’re born we’ll then have to grow old; when we’re old, we’ll then have to grow sick; when we’re sick, we’ll then have to die. This is suffering. This is the way we suffer.”