He was sitting high in a tree from where, obviously, one can fall – and in a deep forest where wild animals roam. The prefect was practically and pragmatically right:

You are in a very dangerous place!

But Dorin said,

“You are in a more dangerous one!”
Hakurakuten asked, “What is dangerous about being in charge of this province?”
Dorin replied, “How can you say that you are not in danger when your passions are burning like fire and you can’t stop worrying about this and that?”

The real danger is not from the outside, the real danger is from the wrong functioning of your mind. And you never get out of the wrong functioning of the mind into a space where mind is no more, but only a pure consciousness.

Hakurakuten then asked, “What is the essence of Buddhism?”
Dorin answered in the words of Shakyamuni, Gautam Buddha:
“Not to do any evil,
To do all good,
To purify oneself –
This is the teaching
of all the buddhas.”
Hakurakuten said,
“Any child of three knows this.”
Dorin said, “That’s so – any child of three knows it, but even a man of eighty can’t do it.”

Knowing and knowing – and the difference is great. Knowing from the outside, knowing from scriptures or teachers or priests, is a false knowing. All scholars are false.

Knowing as your own experience: it is a taste – nobody else can do it for you. It is a deep smell of a roseflower – nobody else can do it for you. It is the experience of your own existence, entering into your deepest core. Out of that experience, what Buddha says:

“Not to do any evil,
To do all good,
To purify oneself –
This is the teaching
of all the buddhas.”

You will have to understand things differently. It is not the beginning, it is the outcome of your self-knowledge. As you become centered in yourself, you cannot do what is evil, you cannot do what is ugly. Centered within yourself, grace arises, a beauty fills your heart; creativity, a song, a poetry, signifying what is unknowable and what is unreachable by the mind. For the first time you become a creative individual. Nothing destructive can come out of you anymore.