the same time keeping an eye and an ear out to observe and contemplate what is going on around them. All activities, whether in the area of the world, such as commerce, or in the area of the Dhamma -- such as maintaining the precepts, chanting, and meditating -- are things the children will have to study and pick up from their parents. Thus parents shouldn't be complacent in their good and bad activities, acting as they like and thinking that the children won't be able to pick things up from them. This sort of attitude is not at all fitting, because the way people treat and mistreat the religion and the nation's institutions comes from what they learn as children. Don't think that it comes from anywhere else, for no one has ever put old people in school. We should thus realize that children begin learning the principles of nature step by step from the day they are born until their parents send them for formal schooling. The principles of nature are everywhere, so that anyone who is interested -- child or adult -- can study them at any time, unlike formal studies and book learning, which come into being at some times and change or disappear at others. For this reason, parents are the most influential mould for their children in the way they look after them, give them love and affection, and provide their education, both in the principles of nature and in the basic subjects that