Roads and transport

Among meritorious deeds, building roads and bridges is a good deed that many people praise.

Transport is an extremely important element in the life of society. Even in our own small house we need a way to get around; and from one village to another, one region to another, all need roads for traffic to pass between them. People travel to work, to trade, to study, to visit... Almost every human activity is tied to roads (including air and water routes); if the roads are blocked, human life meets many obstacles and may even suffer serious accidents. A man riding a two-wheeled vehicle from Saigon to Tây Ninh hit a pothole and fell sprawling onto the road. A large vehicle coming up from behind ran him over and he died on the spot.

Nowadays, in advanced countries, roads are national works built with advanced technology. Motorways and high-speed railways are built to perfection. The transport network within countries and between them keeps developing. Britain and France have completed the tunnel under the English Channel, linking the two countries by a land route running beneath the sea floor.

In ancient times, the technology of building roads and bridges was crude and poor. Dusty dirt tracks and rough roads joined villages and towns together. People had to cross treacherous mountain passes and fast-flowing rivers on foot or on horseback. Even sitting in a horse-drawn cart with round wheels was no comfort, for it jolted violently. Because transport was limited, cultural exchange and social development were narrowed.

In that setting, repairing roads and building bridges and culverts was always necessary work and praised by everyone. For the law of karma, the merit of building roads and bridges is extremely great. The good karmic results that come from that good karma can be listed as follows:

- Because we make everyone's activities more convenient, all our own activities and plans go smoothly and well.

- Because we make travellers safe, we ourselves meet no accidents on the road.

- Because we make it easy for everyone to travel, we ourselves will be healthy, free from disability or deformity.

- If we use our strength to build roads, the karmic result is strength beyond others, so that we reap much success in our labour.

- If we use money to hire people to do the work, the karmic result is abundant wealth.

- We always have vehicles at our ease and travel conveniently.

The practice of building roads and bridges was so emphasised that in the scriptures of Northern Buddhism there appears a Bodhisattva named Trì Địa (Earth-Holder), whose vow is to appear in birth and death for ever in order to sow connections with everyone by repairing roads and bridges.

King Aśoka was proud only of having planted shade trees along the roads for pedestrians and dug wells along the roads for travellers to drink from.

A moving story is told in Sand and Pebbles (translated by Đỗ Đình Đồng) as follows:

Zenkai, the son of a samurai, travelled to Edo and became a retainer of a high official there. Zenkai fell in love with the official's wife, and this was discovered. To defend himself, Zenkai killed the husband and ran away with the wife.

After that the two became thieves, but the woman was so greedy that Zenkai came to despise her. In the end Zenkai left the woman and went to a distant province called Buzen. In Buzen, to atone for his past, Zenkai resolved to do some good in his life. Learning that on the slope of a rocky mountain there was a dangerous path where many people had been injured and killed, Zenkai decided to dig a tunnel through the rock.

By day he begged for food, by night he dug into the mountain. When Zenkai was past thirty, the tunnel had been dug to a length of 695 thước, a height of 6 thước and a width of 9 thước.

Two years before the work was complete, a son of the official whom Zenkai had killed, who had learned swordsmanship and become a master of it, found Zenkai and wanted to kill him to avenge his father.

Zenkai said:

"I will give you my life, but let me finish this work. When the work is done you may kill me."

The son agreed to wait until the day it was finished. Months passed and Zenkai went on digging. The son grew bored with nothing to do and began to help Zenkai dig. After helping Zenkai for more than a year, he came to admire Zenkai's courage and character.

At last the tunnel was finished and people could pass through in safety.

Zenkai said:

"Now the work is done, cut off my head!"

"How could I cut off your head, Master?" the young man asked through his tears.

In this story, Zenkai's toilsome labour of digging the tunnel wiped out the son's deep hatred. Besides this, Zenkai also enjoys immeasurable merit in the future. Still, in any case he must pay the karmic result of killing a man and taking his wife in another life.

A Buddhist who sold soy milk in Phan Rang did "volunteer road work" by providing soy milk to the workers building a road nearby.

In our country, the labour of building roads seems heavy and little esteemed. But no one realises that they are creating very great merit. Helping and nourishing road workers is always something to be encouraged, just as if we ourselves joined forces to build the road. Or picking up broken fragments and thorns on the road so that those coming after do not step on them is also very good.

Sometimes we feel sad as we pass through a small hamlet where stretches of road are broken and stagnant puddles sit bare before everyone's eyes. These are opportunities for everyone to make merit, but they calmly and carelessly pass them by. If no one bothers about the common interests of a hamlet, what can be said of the interests of the nation or of humankind! A country develops only when its people always think of the interests of the whole rather than the interests of the individual.

The opposite of the good karma of building roads is the evil karma of destroying them. Those who obstruct traffic will also suffer a corresponding karmic result, such as difficulty in travelling, obstacles in their activities, disability of the legs and poverty. As for public welfare works such as roads, bridges and culverts, if we cannot protect them, so be it, but let us not, for our own interest, damage them. The karmic result later will be unbearably unpleasant.

The world's demand for transport keeps growing. Motorbikes are produced in vast numbers. Traffic jams occur constantly. Could it be that, because transport is easy, people want to travel even more? A workplace far from home is a main factor in the congestion at peak hours.

In the not too distant future, improved telecommunications will ease people's need to travel. With a videophone system controlled automatically by computers, people can stay at home and still attend meetings and direct the work of their offices. A worker can even stay at home and still operate a machine normally through computerised telecommunications.

But that will not end people's dream of going places. They will rack their brains and toil to reach other planets. Human beings still love to go.