What do we spend our lives on?

One day, when a Russian puppy named Tserenpil, who lived with me, ran home after playing in the street, I called out to him, ‘You don't care about your home and your belongings, you just do what you do, you go wherever you can!’ And I slapped him. Then he—and he was bright and clever, mind you—became indignant and said hoarsely, ‘Ha! How can a dog who chases fun be worse than a monk who chases profit?’ Then I said: ‘Don’t speak so arrogantly. If the big dogs catch you, what then?’ ‘They'll eat me, so be it. My dog’s body is not one of the hard-to-get ones. But if you use your hard-to-get human body for all sorts of nonsense—compared to the fact that I use my dog’s body for playing—what’s the use?’

Agvaankhaidav, also known by his Tibetan name Ngawang Khedrub (1779–1838), was a nineteenth-century Mongolian religious figure, philosopher, and writer. He was the leader of the renewal movement in Mongolian Buddhism, which came to fruition in the early twentieth century.