The Rice Seller and the Language of the Future

Every morning at a familiar street corner, the air buzzes with the elderly rice seller's call of "Fresh sticky rice!" She cannot read or write, and her eyes have grown cloudy with age and late-night lamplight. Yet her hands move deftly, and her lips murmur as she counts money with a speed that earns the admiration of many young people.

A customer handed her a fifty-thousand banknote, buying two packages of green bean sticky rice at ten thousand each.

"Two packages make twenty, you pay fifty, so I give you thirty back in change!" the old lady announced clearly, her hand pulling out three ten-thousand notes to return, accompanied by a kind smile.

The customer was surprised. "You calculate so quickly, without a computer?"

She laughed warmly. "It's what my belly remembers, dear. If I didn't know how to count money selling rice, who would buy from me?"

This image reveals a profound lesson about adaptation. In the old society, "mathematics" was the minimum skill for communication and survival. Though illiterate, she had to know arithmetic to avoid being pushed out of the economic circle. If she couldn't calculate, she would suffer losses, be cheated, and eventually go bankrupt.

But today, the "mathematics" of the new era is "programming." It is no longer simple addition and subtraction, but a language for communicating with machines and artificial intelligence. Just as the rice seller needs to know arithmetic to sell her goods, modern humans need to know programming (or at least understand its logic) to operate assistive tools, to have machines calculate complex problems on their behalf.

The teacher draws the analogy that if in the future, machines independently find purpose and create, those who don't know how to "talk" to machines through programming will become redundant. They will be like the rice seller who cannot count, standing on the margins of society's flow. Learning programming is not necessarily to become a software engineer, but to retain the right to serve, to contribute, and to exist with dignity in a rapidly transforming world.

The promise to the Buddha regarding learning programming is not an empty ritual, but a commitment to oneself not to be left behind, to maintain the ability to bring value to the community as technology permeates every aspect of life.

**Meaning of the Story**

The story uses the metaphor of the rice seller to illustrate society's law of elimination. The core skills for survival change with the era: from knowing arithmetic to knowing programming. The lesson emphasizes that to maintain the goal of "living usefully," humans must continuously update their knowledge and skills. If we do not adapt to the progress of science and technology, especially artificial intelligence, we will lose opportunities to contribute and may even be eliminated from humanity's collective journey.

Compiled from a dharma talk by Venerable Thích Chân Quang.