Anyone who practices mindfulness knows that there are forces in the mind that can make it difficult to be mindful. Rather than reacting to these difficulties as somehow being “bad” or as “distractions,” it is important to investigate them. It is easier to find freedom from something when we know it thoroughly. Ancient Buddhist stories tell of Mara, the Buddhist personification of temptation and distraction, approaching the Buddha. Each time, the Buddha simply says, “Mara, I see you,” and Mara flees. Because the Buddha knew Mara thoroughly, his act of clear seeing was effective in bringing freedom.
Of the many forces of distraction, five are traditionally identified as particularly important for meditators to be familiar with. Known as the five hindrances, they are forces in the mind that can hinder our ability to see clearly or to become concentrated. The hindrances are: 1) sensual desire, 2) ill will, 3) sloth and torpor, 4) anxiousness and worry, and 5) doubt.
As you can see, the list is actually made up of seven factors, but four are always paired. One explanation for the paired items is that they represent closely related but distinguishable physical and mental factors. Another explanation is that this makes it easier to show a one-to-one relationship between the five hindrances and another traditional list, the five mental qualities needed for the mind to become concentrated. Each of these qualities is said to be an antidote to one of the hindrances: one-pointedness overcomes desire, joy overcomes ill-will, arousing and engaging one’s attention overcomes sloth and torpor, happiness overcomes anxiousness and worry, and sustaining attention overcomes doubt.
The hindrances can be like “black holes” in the mind. A black hole is a collapsed star where the gravitational force is so powerful that even light is sucked in and trapped. When the hindrances are strong, the light of awareness is pulled into their gravitational field and we lose our ability to see what is happening. We may get lost in thought or fantasy fueled by a hindrance.
When they aren’t so strong as to act like black holes, the hindrances can still cloud our ability to see clearly, particularly to know what is harmful and what is beneficial to do, say, or think.
An ancient metaphor for how the hindrances obscure clarity of mind is that of a pond. When the pond is clean and the surface still, the water reflects our image. The effect of sensual desire is like looking into a pond that has been dyed. We are predisposed to see unrealistically – i.e., “seeing with rose colored glasses.” When the heat of ill will is present, it is as if the pond water is boiling; no reflection is possible. Sloth and torpor are like having thick algae growing across the pond; again, no reflection is possible except by the difficult work of pulling out the algae. Anxiousness is like the wind churning up the pond’s surface. And doubt is like the water filled with mud. Because we tend not to see clearly when the hindrances are present, Buddhist teachings strongly encourage people not to make decisions while under their influence. If possible, wait to make a decision when the mind is more settled or clear.
The hindrances operate in everyone; their presence is not a personal failing. Rather, it is useful see their occurrence as an important opportunity to investigate them. Sometimes it is wise to not attempt to quickly get rid of a hindrance but to use it as a chance to learn something. The stronger the hindrance, the more important it is to investigate it.
The Buddha taught five areas that are useful to explore when investigating a hindrance: the hindrance itself, its absence, how it arose, how it is removed, and how to prevent it from arising again.
Exploring the hindrance in and of itself involves recognizing the components of a hindrance, e.g. its physical, energetic, emotional, cognitive and motivational aspects. For example, strong desire may be experienced physically as a leaning forward, a tightening of the solar plexus, or a sense of lightness. Energetically it may be a rushing or lifting. Emotionally it may involve pleasant emotions like delight, excitement, eagerness, or an effort to fix unpleasant emotions such as emptiness, loneliness, or fear. Cognitively it may involve beliefs and stories that we tell ourselves. And, motivationally, it may come as a strong impulse to act or to cling.
Noticing a hindrance’s absence is also important. The contrast between when it is absent and when it is present can help us to perceive the different aspects of the hindrance more clearly. Noticing its absence can also help reinforce a state of being free of hindrances.
Appreciating the passing of a hindrance can be a source of joy that can feed the spiritual life. I believe the Buddha was pointing to this joy when he offered the following similes: being freed from sensual desire is like being freed from debt; being released from the grip of ill will is like recovering from an illness; being free from sloth and torpor is like being freed from prison; freedom from anxiety and worry is like freedom from slavery; and passing beyond doubt is like completing a perilous desert crossing.
Noticing how hindrances arise, how they are removed and how they can be prevented from arising is the same as knowing how you got into trouble, how to get out of trouble, and how to avoid getting into trouble in the future. It requires attention and discernment to overcome the hindering effect of the hindrances. With enough experience with them we learn not to be tricked into giving up our presence of mind no matter what hindrance may appear.
To be present without being hijacked by the hindrances is a joy. Unhindered attention is a treasure. It is what allows mindfulness to begin doing its most penetrating work of liberation.
Article source: www.insightmeditationcenter.org
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Friday, February 12, 2010
Hindrances to Clear Seeing
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Rich Generosity
When a candle is lit in a dark room, it illuminates the room to some extent, but its power is limited. But if you use the same candle to light another candle, the total brightness increases. If you continue to do this, you can fill the room with brilliant illumination. The idea of transferring merit to others is like this. If we keep our ownlight selfishly hidden, it will only provide a limited amount of illumination. But when we share our light with others, we do not diminish our own light. Rather, we increase the amount of light available to all. Therefore, when others light our candle, we issue forth light. When out of gratitude we use our candle to lightother people’s candles, the whole room gets brighter. This is why we transfer merit to others. This kind of light is continuous and inexhaustible.
When we achieve a mind of gratitude and dedicate ourselves to helping others, we can practice generosity. We can be generous with our wealth, with ourselves, and with the Dharma. In some ways, giving wealth is the easiest. If we consume less and live more frugally, we can give away what we save.
It is also useful to remember that the nature of giving is not necessarily dependent on the size or the value of the gift. Once, the Buddha was about to teach the Dharma to a congregation in the forest, but it got dark. Several people offered their lamps, but there was a homeless woman whose only possession was an alms bowl, which she offered to serve as an oil lamp. On realizing this, the Buddha exclaimed to his congregation that the old lady’s virtue was the most excellent, as she had offered her total wealth, the begging bowl. By making her offering, do you think she lost anything?
So when out of gratitude we dedicate ourselves to benefit others, this is practicing generosity or giving. This is something we can learn. Some people think by giving everything away, you end up with nothing. But the Dharma is an inexhaustible well. However much you give of it, you can always go back for more, because in this well the more you take from it, the higher the water will rise. As long as you give the Dharma to nourish others, it will be there. As long as you are alive and are able to practice, this will be true. Being alive, you can learn more and more, and give more and more. Being alive, you can also take time to rest and recover, then go back to the source. This is how giving the Dharma works.
From The Method of No-Method: The Chan Practice of Silent Illumination, © 2008 by Sheng Yen. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications, Inc.,
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Saturday, February 06, 2010
The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation
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Friday, February 05, 2010
Working with Negativity
"We all experience negativity--the basic aggression of wanting things to be different than they are. We cling, we defend, we attack, and thoughout there is a sense of one's own wretchedness, and so we blame the world for our pain. This is negativity. We experience it as terribly unpleasant, foul smelling, something we want to get rid of. But if we look into it more deeply, it has a very juicy smell and is very alive. Negativity is not bad per se, but something living and precise, connected with reality.
Negativity breeds tension, friction, gossip, discontentment, but it is also very accurate, deliberate and profound. Unfortunately, the heavy handed interpretations and judgements we lay on these experiences obscure this fact. These interpretations are negative negativity, watching ourselves being negative and then deciding that the negativity is justified in being there. This negativity seems good natured, with all sorts of good qualities in it, so we pat its back, guard it and justify it. Or, if we are blamed or attacked by others, we interpret their negativity as being good for us. In either case, the watcher, by commenting, interpreting and judging, is camouflaging and hardening the basic negativity.
. . . . . The basic honesty and simplicity of negativity can be creative in community as well as in personal relationships. Basic negativity is very revealing sharp and accurate. If we leave it as basic negativity rather than overlaying it with conceptualizations, then we see the nature of it's intelligence. Negativity breeds a great deal of energy, which clearly seen becomes intelligence. When we leave the energies as they are with their natural qualities, they are living rather than conceptualized. They strenghten our daily lives...."
~ The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
~ Other Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's Works
(with Amazon Book Reviews)
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Thursday, February 04, 2010
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
The Life of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
This film is an authentic portrait of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, one of Tibet's great contemporary teachers, considered to be a "Master of Masters" among the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism.
Renowned as a great meditator, guru, poet, scholar and as one of the main teachers of the Dalai Lama, the Nyingma Lama Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche died in 1991. Ten years in the making, this film began in 1989 when translator Matthieu Riacrd and Vivian Kurz began taping extensive footage of their teacher. Shot in rarely filmed Kham, Eastern Tibet, as well as Nepal, Bhutan, India and France, the film shows the rich and intricate tapestry Of Tibetan Buddhism and is a witness to the strength, wisdom and depth of Tibetan culture.
Narration by Richard Gere with music by Philip Glass.
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Thursday, January 28, 2010
Compassion and Wisdom
"The human heart is basically very compassionate, but without wisdom, compassion will not work. Wisdom is the openness that lets us see what is essential and most effective."
As human beings, we all try our best to bring about a world based on kindness and compassion. What seems to go wrong, however, is that what I want, what I personally would like, becomes more important than the benefit of the whole community.
Whether we look at religion, philosophy, science, development or politics, wherever there has been human society it has manifested wisdom and compassion. But because of our tendency to be involved with our own selfishness, our own likes and dislikes, we develop walls and isolate ourselves from others.
We do not allow the openness that can be felt between human beings to express itself because of two fundamental things: hope and fear. All of us want some happiness and no one wants to suffer, so every action we take is motivated by the thought of how can I be happy, how can I avoid pain. In a world already divided in so many ways, we create a world of our own. A very selfish attitude develops.
All philosophies and religions in the world aim to break through this wall of self-isolation, so that we can work with one another with real care and compassion. From a Buddhist point of view, we examine ourselves carefully—not as a way of blaming ourselves for having created this division, but as a way of working with the root cause of the problem.
The problem is not with the world, or with other people, but with ourselves. Wisdom is innate in us; it is not something that can be bought, heard or received from outside. But our involvement with the external environment and the distraction of our own emotions causes a kind of layering or veiling that prevents us from observing ourselves carefully. We do not give ourselves enough time and space to use our innate wisdom to observe ourselves before we act.
However, through meditation, to use an Eastern term, or examination or analysis, to use more Western terms, there exists the possibility for wisdom to arise within every human being. Meditation is the process of looking inward, of refraining from our dualistic tendency to pay more attention to external issues than to the internal issues we don’t want to work on.
A society based upon peace, harmony, wisdom and compassion is not going to come about unless each person begins with themselves. Through our ignorance, our failure to use our innate wisdom, we make many excuses for not starting with ourselves. The biggest excuse we use is that we require the other person to change before we do. So if I get up in the morning and things don’t happen the way that I want, everything gets blamed on my external world. On days when everything goes right, people look good to us and appear kinder.
If we reflect on it, we realize that our perception of the external world has much to do with our internal attitude. Our mind makes excuses based on external circumstances that reflect what we feel inside. When we see a person and he does something we like, then he is a good person. But if this same person does something we don’t like, then he is a bad person. So transforming the external environment must begin with transforming the inner self, because only when the self is tamed and a fair amount of awareness exists within us will we have the strength to relate properly with others.
The human heart is basically very good, very generous, and very compassionate. But it may not always work together with wisdom. The result is that we have many people ready to go out and change the world for the better, but who still view philosophy, religion, and politics according to what they like, according to what they want.
Even in matters of spirituality—where we struggle to attain some selflessness and to let go of attachment, ignorance and selfishness—even there we assert that what we think is wisdom is correct. We assert that what we think is compassion is the correct compassion. Even at the very peak of meditation, we may still have these same opinions, but we use the excuse that it’s for the benefit of all sentient beings. The endless struggle with the self creates this same problem over and over again.
Realizing the innate wisdom in every human being must begin with training the self. To break through ignorance requires breaking through ignorance in all of its forms.
Ignorance is not something that comes from others. Ignorance is something that comes from the projection of the self. In Buddhist philosophy, we speak a lot about illusion, which refers to how human ignorance, or the human mind, creates a lot of external phenomena, and how once that illusion is created, we see it as very solid and permanent.
In meditation, we break through that illusion of external phenomena by analyzing its dream-like nature. The first step is to understand how we create our own illusion—to see how this human mind works to create and solidify the world. If then we can let go of our attachment to that illusion, we will be free from pain, free from our own expectations, and free from our own hope and fear.
Until that level of awareness is achieved, however, every moment of your life, everything you use or consume, comes about from dependence on others. You sit on chairs which were made by other people. You wear clothes which were made by other people. You eat food cooked by other people, which in turn was grown by other people. As much as you would like to believe that you are your own person and have achieved things through your own efforts, the truth is that you are linked with all other beings.
This awareness of our interdependence leads directly to a sense of responsibility, and letting go of our self-grasping. Until we have achieved true selflessness, completely free from ignorance, we can begin in a smaller way by giving back to others what we have received in order to benefit others the best way we can.
Whether we call it compassion, love, caring or a Buddhist term such as bodhicitta, it means the same thing: that in your actions, speech and thought you put others before yourself. Some of us practice meditation to achieve this understanding; others are able to understand this without formal meditation. But no matter how good compassion sounds when you talk about it, it really comes down to practicing it. And no one understands you as well as you do. You need the wisdom to look inward to see what kind of a person you are.
Compassion means letting go of your self-identity, letting go of proving that identity all the time. Compassion means you work in the way the wind works, the sun works, or the air works. Take, for example, how the air assumes the shape of the room. The air does not say, “I will give you this breathing space provided you breathe the way I want.” Everyone enjoys the benefit of being able to breathe in the air. It is the same way with the sun: the sun does not stop shining when there are clouds in the sky.
In that same way, selflessness free from attachment, or compassion used with wisdom, means that one goes beyond the way you want to do things. If you can let go of making yourself the most important person in the world, there will be more capacity and spaciousness within you to work with others. You will find more space, time and energy within yourself.
For example, because of your good heart and kindness, you go to work in a hospital or a hospice. But you find that there are restrictions and you can’t do things the way you want to. You find yourself fighting against the system, and you reach the point where you are exhausted by your efforts. You conclude that your compassion is not being used in the best way.
What needs to be understood at this point, by applying wisdom to your compassion, is how much solidity you are bringing to the situation. Because you are holding on to how you think things should be, your feelings of frustration have overshadowed the creativity you might apply to the situation.
When we want to generate compassion, we ultimately end up working with our own emotions. We discover that any situation which overwhelms us does so to the degree that we solidify it. So without wisdom, compassion will not work. Wisdom is what enables us to be unconditioned and unbiased in our actions. With wisdom, we are not limited to a single cause or purpose; we do our best in a given situation, and then we move on.
Without wisdom, we too often become focused on one single problem or issue, which we think is the most important thing. But we live in a world that is populated by human beings, and as long as there are billions of human beings at work, there will not be a single thing that everyone accepts. There will be many things that are not done or said exactly the way that you like. If you look at different philosophies—whether Christianity, Buddhism, Islam or Hinduism—all of them arise from compassion. But I believe this one is correct, you believe that one is correct, someone else believes another is correct. Even with such a universal concept such as compassion, Buddhists feel it necessary to call it bodhicitta, Hindus feel it necessary to call it karuna, Christians feel it necessary to call it love. We stick to our own terms.
Wisdom teaches us that these differences should not cause us to pull back. They should not stop us from exercising our compassion with even greater strength and motivation. When the Buddha first gave teachings, how many people understood them? None. Because of that, he refused to give the teachings for a period of seven weeks, but then he began to teach again.
If the Buddha had refused to teach because no one listened to him, we would not have the Buddhist religion today. Similarly, if I insist that my words and my compassion have to be accepted by everyone, that really would be decadent wisdom. That would be wisdom for me and no one else. But real wisdom is letting go of the fixation on what I think is right, in order to see more clearly what is really helpful. Wisdom is the openness that lets us see what is essential and most effective, what truly needs to be practiced by all humanity. This is very necessary. This is something that we need to practice.
Wisdom requires that we work with the inner self, in order to act in accordance with the basic goodness we all have. And when we meet with obstacles or difficulties, we can use them to develop more inspiration, for if we sincerely value kindness and caring, that belief will give us the courage to overcome all obstacles. Wisdom is being able to use obstacles in this way. Otherwise, wisdom becomes some sort of museum piece, and we end up collecting philosophies, logics and teachings just like people who collect old furniture.
The wisdom of all the world’s traditions needs to be nurtured and cared for, not collected. Our innate wisdom needs to be developed, understood and sharpened. Each person must develop the quality of fearlessness so that wisdom can cut through their ignorance. The best wisdom is that which you have the courage to apply to yourself. Only then can you really understand human beings as they are. Then you can give yourself and others the chance to grow individually, to think as they want. All of us need space to develop.
We can all learn together to some degree, but the transformation of the world must begin within ourselves. Compassion and wisdom need to function together, combined with skillfulness, tolerance and patience. If we give ourselves the time and space to really observe our own thoughts and actions, good can come about. We give ourselves and others a lot of space in which to function properly; rather than act selfishly, we act selflessly.
Much of this is easy to say. Practice definitely begins with ourselves. When we look into a mirror, we usually know what we want to see, and so we see only what we want. To see what is really in the mirror, good or bad, and to work with what we see, is very important and very necessary. It takes some courage.
So think carefully, because times change. Every moment of life, we lose someone that we know. Time does not wait for anyone, and because there is change in every moment, frivolousness harms only ourselves. But if, in our short lives as human beings, we are able to be of some benefit to someone else, then that is the activity of an enlightened being.
The Ven. Khandro Rinpoche is one of the most prominent women teachers in Tibetan Buddhism. She is a holder of the Kagyü and Nyingma lineages of vajrayana Buddhism; her root teachers are the late Sixteenth Karmapa, the late Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, and her father, Mindrolling Tichen Rinpoche. Fluent in English, Khandro Rinpoche teaches regularly in North America and Europe.
Compassion and Wisdom, Venerable Khandro Rinpoche, Shambhala Sun, July 2000.
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Wednesday, January 27, 2010
利用佛法来解决忧郁症、自杀的问题（净空法师讲述）
(一)利用佛法来解决忧郁症自杀的问题
主持人：我们非常感恩师父给我们这么宝贵的开示。记得在华藏卫视开播二、三个月的时候，有一天，有位观众打电话到华藏卫视的客服中心，他说他要特别感恩上净下空老和尚，因为他在无意中，看到了华藏卫视中，师父在讲《十善业道经》，所以他到现在还活着，要不然的话，他三天以前就已经自杀了。所以他要特别的感恩，我们的上净下空老和尚，救了他的一命。我们更希望今天，透过师父的再次的开示，能够更加的挽救那些想要自杀的人，珍重生命，爱惜自己，同时我们更希望那些忧郁症的人能够远离忧郁症。
我们再来请教师父，刚刚师父提到不同维次空间，这个觉得很有趣。我又想到在华藏卫视开播没有多久，我们几乎天天接到有些妈妈打电话来，她说很奇怪，我们家的小孩还不到两岁，他们每天就是吵着阿公阿嬷，吵着爸爸妈妈，我要看拜拜那一台，结果他的妈妈帮他打开了华藏卫视以后，他看了这个电视台，他就在那边一直的拜，一直的拜。他的妈妈说，这个电视台让小孩非常的喜欢，尤其是两岁以下的。他们好像在哭的时候，他们把这个电视台打开，他们就一直拜，然后很高兴的一直看。因为他们根本就听不太懂，可是他们会很欢喜的看。
我本来也觉得很奇怪，真有这回事吗？但是很多人都这么说。一直到没有多久以前，我在澳洲的时候，当场看到了，有位也就是师父秘书潘维邦先生，他的一个两岁左右的小孩子，他一进来，那时候华藏卫视就在师父客厅的旁边，正在播放师父的讲经，他一进来，他就到电视机面前，也就一直拜，一直的拜。所以我想这确实有这么一回事。我想要请教师父，是不是因为他们看到了不同维次空间？因为师父在讲经的时候，相信会有很多的天神都在看，旁边磁场也特别得好，当然我们是看不到，那些两岁左右的，天真无邪的小孩，也许他们看到了，是不是这个原因？我想请问师父。
净空老法师：你说这个话有可能。这只要我们细心去观察婴儿，你看他还睡在摇篮里面，你细心观察他的表情，你看他有的时候笑，有的时候他也很伤心，好像在哭，他那个表情细心观察，好像有人在他旁边。这桩事情，我们曾经遇到过中国国内特异功能的人，我遇到他们是在美国洛杉矶，听说那一次，这很多年前，他们一共有十个人到了美国，好像也是国家派去的；有三位到洛杉矶，年纪很轻，只有二十几岁，确确实实一点都不错。我们有位女同修，应该那个时候五十岁左右，就来做试验。他说他们有天眼，叫ｘ光眼，能透视。她说你看看我的身体，你能够透视，看我身体的状况。这个人一看，他说你在多少年前，曾经得到肺结核，但是现在已经钙化，指出她的部位。她吓了一跳。你看结婚那么多年，确实有这个事情，她先生都不知道，从来没有跟人讲过，她说他真有这个能力。
然后就问他，你们这种能力怎么来的？多半都是与生俱来的，生下来就有。会不会失掉？他说会，如果我们一天到晚胡思乱想，就失掉了。这个说得就有道理，这种能力维持靠什么？靠定，靠清净心。小孩的心（童心）他没有妄想，所以多半都具有这个能力，特别是在三、四岁之前，一般人，实在讲一般人都有。可是三、四岁以后，你知道的事情多了，妄念起来了，就是分别执着起来了，那这慢慢他就退化掉了，到十岁之后就完全没有，这是一般普通人。那他们这些人多半都是生活在农村，他能保持的时间长久，因为他接触花花世界机会太少，农村淳朴，所以他能保持到二、三十岁，三十岁以后很少。这说得很有道理。这佛法跟我们讲，修清净心就恢复到本能。要晓得这不是叫特异功能，是我们每个人的本能，我们这个本能是被妄想分别执着盖覆住了，是这么回事情。
所以佛在《华严．出现品》里面说得好，“一切众生皆有如来智慧德相，但以妄想执着而不能证得”。禅定是什么意思？就是把妄想分别执着放下，你放下得愈多，放下得愈彻底，你恢复的能力就愈多。所以能力是恢复，不是从哪里得来，从哪里得来那就错了，是本有的这些能力。本有当然可以恢复，妄想分别执着本性里头没有，没有当然可以断掉，问题就是你明不明了这事实真相。果然明了，你就好好的去修你的清净心，大乘教里面让我们修的，修什么？真诚心、清净心、平等心、正觉心、慈悲心，就修这个。在哪里修？在生活当中修。真诚是体，决定没有虚伪，虚伪是迷失了真诚，就变成虚伪；迷了清净就变成染浊，就染污了；迷失了平等就贡高，人就傲慢，贡高，平等心没有了；迷失了正觉，糊涂了，就迷惑颠倒了；迷失了慈悲就自私自利。所以要晓得这些烦恼自性里头本来没有，你真心自性里面只有真诚清净平等正觉慈悲。
我们今天希望恢复本有，把这个本无的舍掉，所以在一切时、一切处对人对事对物，无论是顺境、是逆境，无论是善缘，还是恶缘，首先你记住，一定要保持自己心地的清净，不受染污。什么是染污？喜怒哀乐爱恶欲是染污，七情五欲。不生七情五欲你接触一切境界就生智慧，智慧的对面是烦恼。我们读《坛经》，你看看六祖惠能大师，他第一天见五祖，五祖派他到柴房里面去工作，给他一份差事，舂米破柴，这都是苦事情。他在离开的时候跟五祖说了一句话，他说“弟子心中常生智慧”，五祖听了，快去快去。这了不起！那我们要是见了五祖一定说：祖师，弟子心中常生烦恼。他常生智慧，常生智慧表示真诚清净平等正觉慈悲他统统都有了，所以黄梅住了八个月，五祖就把衣钵传给他。神秀跟他多少年都没有得到，给他得去了，什么原因？他真的叫还原，真的叫回归，回归到自性，这个道理我们不能不懂。
我们学佛学什么？就学这个。学到这个，什么问题都解决，真的是“天下本无事，庸人自扰之”。宇宙是和谐的，法界是和谐的，不和那就是病。我常常教人观身，观身会开智慧。我们这个身体大分在外面，眼耳鼻舌身，眼不是耳，耳不是鼻，鼻不是舌。眼耳鼻舌身各人管各人的事，很守本分，眼只管看，它不管听；耳只管听，不管看。你看看各人管着自己的本分，不干涉别人，不反对别人，而且自自然然密切合作，这个人健康。现在我们来个麻烦，眼只会看，我用什么机器让眼睛也能听，你让耳朵也能看，也许这个科学技术可以把你做到，但是你把你的自然环境破坏了。破坏之后你就会有副作用，那个副作用就要了你的命。随顺自然是德，破坏自然是灾害。你内里面五脏六腑也是各有各的本分事，各有各的功能，各人把各人的功能做好，不干涉别人，不妨碍别人，密切合作，人身心健康。和，和为贵，宇宙是太和，地球生态平衡就是和睦相处。
那我们今天科学发达了，要破坏自然生态环境，好了，人家报复的是什么？水灾、旱灾、风灾、地震，这报复来的，像禽流感。瘟疫是什么？瘟疫是你杀害众生太多，禽流感，你看一般吃鸡肉，中国人喜欢鸭肉，北京什么烤鸭，我从来没有吃过。从小，小时候贫穷想吃没得吃，长大的时候学了佛，可以吃，不能吃，所以一生没有嚐过，跟牠们不结冤仇。将来还有很多奇奇怪怪的病，你杀害的众生太多了，什么都要吃，什么都要报复你，冤冤相报，生生世世没完没了，你说多恐怖、多可怕！在过去我们学佛的人，佛法禁止不吃这些东西，它有道理的，为什么不吃众生肉？培养慈悲心，这是最重要的，当然不跟众生结冤仇，那是从因果上讲的，在佛法正理上讲是养慈悲心，不忍心吃众生肉。
我在几个月之前，有一次机会到山东庆云去访问，看一个养鸭工厂，规模很大。工厂里的负责人告诉我，北京烤鸭三分之一是他们厂里头供应。我去看的时候，一群小鸭子，他就递了一只放在我手掌里头，跟我手掌一样大，这么大。他问我：法师，你看看，这个鸭子出生多少天了？我一看至少十天，我们从前在农村里头，我们生长在农村，这鸡鸭鹅家里都养，邻居也养，养这么大至少十天。他告诉我两天，我吓了一跳，我说那你这个鸭子长大，卖到北京做烤鸭，大概需要多久时间？两个星期。怎么长大的？喂的都是化学饲料，吃了叫牠赶快膨胀。这饲料有问题，不是自然的。你要叫牠到外面自己去觅食的话，十天，至少十天才能长那么大。我看了之后，我就回去告诉大家，鸡蛋、鸭蛋不能吃了，为什么？牠那个正常的生态被破坏了。虽然这个鸡蛋跟鸭蛋不是种蛋，专门是生蛋的，都不行。这个鸡鸭本身生态平衡破坏了，所以我相信这个蛋吃的也不健康，我就劝大家不要再吃了。这是我们亲眼看到的，你才能觉悟到。
现在人聪明，破坏自然环境，所得来这些报应，天灾人祸、瘟疫，都是自作自受，我们不做的人就能够幸免。长养自己慈悲心的人，做出牺牲奉献来帮助一切苦难众生，包括这些动植物，这种人有福，这种人不遭难。这是相信因果教育的人有这个信心，纵然这些灾难现前，也如如不动，也能够保持自己的真诚清净慈悲，这是自度度人不二法门。贵在能信，不信就没有法子。“佛不度无缘之人”，什么叫无缘？不信就无缘，相信就有缘。
主持人：非常的感恩师父给我们这么宝贵的开示，更希望大家听完了这堂课以后，大家都能够认真的受教，都听从师父的教诲，好好的修清净心，心清净身就清净。更希望大家都能够和睦相处，人与人之间和睦相处，与自然界，与所有的一切宇宙，一切的空间，一切各个维次空间的这些众生，都能够和睦相处，我们就是一个安和乐利的社会。再一次感恩我们的上净下空老和尚，也谢谢各位，阿弥陀佛。
净空老法师：现在中国领导人提倡和谐社会，非常重要！我们明白这些道理之后，就是从自身你能看到和谐。你从这里就学习到，我在这个世间，我是哪个行业，我是做些什么，把我自己本分的事情做好。今天我们是一个佛教徒、是个出家人，我们的本分事情，释迦牟尼佛做了一个样子，一生教学。我们把经典学好，把经典讲好，讲清楚、讲明白，经典里面的教诲我们自己做到，我们也帮助别人做到。与不同的宗教，不同的族群，不同的文化，就像我们身体不同的器官一样。我们要尊重他，我们不能干涉他，不能反对他，不能破坏他；要帮助他，提升他，互助合作。所以从身心的和就能够推广到一家和，一个社团和，一个国家和，一个地区和，整个世界和。“和为贵”，这中国人最讲究的。你看看，故宫的三个大殿，太和、中和、保和。帝王用什么治国？以和治国，这是我们要记住的。和一定从本身做起，别人跟我不和，我跟他和，这就对了，这样和才能和得成功。如果是自己不愿意跟人和，希望别人跟我和，那个和永远不能落实。好，谢谢大家。
主持人：再一次感恩师父，更谢谢各位，阿弥陀佛。（净空法师•答香港参学同修之二十—关于禽流感、忧郁症、自杀答问 2005/11/4）
(二)面对自杀－敞开胸怀，不要逃避
主持人：非常感恩师父，再给我们这么宝贵的开示。刚刚师父提到江逸子老师画的这个地狱变相图里面自杀的果报，也许有些人还没有看过，有些观众朋友也许他们都还不知道，能不能请师父再给我们明示的讲出，让大家能够更深一层的认识不能够自杀，不能够轻言放弃自己的生命。
净空老法师：在伦理上讲，自杀是逃避现实。你逃避现实，你怎么能对得起你父母？你怎么能对得起祖宗？对社会上来讲，你一个人生活在世间，能够有自杀的勇气，那勇气也很可观，也不是容易的。一般人你叫他自杀，你看他敢不敢。所以有自杀的勇气，他要一回过头来舍己为人，我要为社会做一番事业，没有不成功的。世界上最难找的就是舍己为人，我自杀已经是舍己，我为什么不拿这个身体奉献给一些苦难众生，替他们做一点好事情？我求学是为这个事情，不为自己，自己没有自私自利，没有名闻利养，没有贪瞋痴慢，全心全力奉献给社会，奉献给众生，为他们做一点好事，就称圣人。念头一转，你看生死、圣凡一念之间，所以不应该。
对于这些果报的事情，世间人说得少、回避，它有问题，宗教里头讲得多。你要问为什么宗教里头讲得这么多？宗教确确实实它有它的那一套，它那一套绝对不是造谣生事，不是欺骗众生。用现代的话说突破了空间维次，他能看到过去，能看到未来；过去是你的前生，未来是你的来生，你的前世来生他都能看到。这些话现在科学家承认，我在澳洲听锺茂森先生的报告，他是前年从美国太空总署里面所发出来的资讯，最新的研究报告里面有，肯定时间、空间不是真的。这个报告跟佛法讲的相应，跟许多宗教里头讲的都相应。
他说时间在某种条件之下，时间等于零。诸位要晓得，时间等于零，就没有过去，没有未来，过去现在未来你统统看到，时间等于零。空间亦复如是，在某种条件之下，这空间也等于零。空间等于零，给诸位说，距离没有了，远近没有了。宗教里面讲的天堂、天国，佛教里头讲极乐世界、华藏世界在哪里？就在面前，没有距离！时间跟空间不是真的，是可以能够，这个问题能够解决，这在佛法里讲得太多了。我们在很多往生记载里面看到过，人在临命终的时候，阿弥陀佛来接引我们到极乐世界去，人家问他说极乐世界多远？在隔壁，在我家堂屋。这说明是什么？空间没有了。我们今天听到科学家报告，于是我们肯定，对这些记载一点怀疑都没有。它所以然的道理是什么，我们不能不知道。科学家肯定宇宙有不同维次的空间，在理论上讲，不同维次的空间是没有法子计算的，太多太多了。现代科学可以证明至少有十一种不同空间存在，至少有十一种，六道轮回就是六种不同维次的空间。
最早说六道轮回，不是佛教，婆罗门教。婆罗门教是现在印度教的前身，我跟他们接触很多。他们的信徒，传教师告诉我，因为印度人不重视历史，只有传说，他们的宗教传说，在这个世间一万多年，可是我们世界上学术界承认它的历史八千五百年，也很可观！八千五百年。我们佛教世界上承认的，今年是二千四百九十九年，明年才是二千五百年。印度教比我们早很多，就算是八千五百年，比我们也多了五千年，所以他们说的。他们怎么说的？实在讲就是突破空间维次，他看到了，他接触到了。他用什么方法突破？现在科学家没有办法，时空维次知道有，不能突破，这些人突破了，用什么方法？禅定。定功愈深突破的面就愈大，突破也就愈有深度，所以六道是他们发现的。我们在经典里面看到记载，印度教里头修行高明的，居然能够到达无色界天，非想非非想处天，这是六道里面最高的；能够到达阿鼻地狱。换句话说，六道这么大的一个范围，也是有许多不同维次空间，他们全都能突破。但是六道外面，他就没有办法，这就是定功还不够。
一直到释迦牟尼佛出现，才把六道的所以然为我们说出来，为什么会有六道？换句话说，为什么会有空间维次？空间维次怎么来的？佛不说空间维次，佛说法界，法界就是空间维次，怎么来的？都是从一切众生妄想分别执着来的。这我们才真正体会到，妄想分别执着无量无边，所以空间维次无量无边。那修定？修定是把妄想分别执着完全停住，只要一停住空间维次就没有了。有妄想分别执着就有，离妄想分别执着就没有，所以过去未来他看到，此界他方也看到，清清楚楚、明明白白，是这么一回事情。
佛法的修行，无论大乘小乘重视禅定，我们常常听到，佛家常常讲八万四千法门。八万四千法门什么意思？都是修禅定，有八万四千种不同的方法修禅定，离开禅定那就不是佛法，所以八万四千种统统修定。念佛，每天念阿弥陀佛是修禅定吗？是。你看《弥陀经》上讲的，念佛目标在哪里？“一心不乱”，一心不乱就是禅定，一心就是定，不乱就是智慧。所以这句名号定慧等学。念佛什么叫功夫？把你的妄想分别执着念掉了，就叫做功夫，一心才现前，二心就乱了，一心就不乱。所以用这个方法去把时空突破了，那你的境界就不相同，马上就扩大，生活的空间就变了，不拘束在这个时空之内。所以这是一个科学没有法子突破。科学，用许多科学方法，但是都没有离开妄想分别执着，所以没有法子突破，科学能突破是非常有限的。如果把妄想分别执着放下，这个突破就不难。
所以古印度许许多多高级宗教统统修禅定，中国连道家也修禅定，儒家也讲定， “知止而后有定，定而后能静，静而后安，安而后虑”，它也讲这个。但是儒家讲的程度浅，不深，没有道家讲得深。讲得更深的就是佛家，佛家讲禅定，真叫甚深禅定，能把所有空间维次全部突破，它有理论，它有方法。只是现在学佛的人没去照做，还没有离开名闻利养，还没有离开贪瞋痴慢，那跟世俗人没有两样。这天台大师所讲的，这叫名字位人，有名无实，不是真修行，真修行的人不一样的。这些理事我们都要清楚、都要明了，然后你要依照这个方法去做，你有定有慧，什么问题都解决。世间人称为很复杂的问题，在佛法里看很简单，从理上讲“凡所有相，皆是虚妄；一切有为法，如梦幻泡影”。事有理无，相有性无，总不离因果。
所以懂得因果的人，这个人真正有福。没有恶念，没有恶的念头，没有恶言，没有恶的行为，真正是把自己修到纯净纯善。纵然受了冤枉，别人毁谤、侮辱、陷害，心里面是平静的，不但没有怨恨，还感恩。这奇怪了，感什么恩？他毁谤我，他侮辱我，他陷害我，不管我有没有错，都是替我消业障，逆来顺受，业障就消了。如果你要是不服气，他毁谤你，我也要去反驳，不能接受，那好了，那这个怨恨就会变成冤冤相报，生生世世，没完没了，彼此双方都痛苦。所以明白这个道理，逆来顺受正确，这个帐到这里就结掉。这一生当中，我没有得罪他，说不定前世得罪他了，这一世他用不善的态度来对我，那这是报复，我欢喜接受，没有怨恨心，没有报复心，这笔帐消了，下一生如果再遇到，就是好朋友，这就说化解冲突。
所以冲突不可以消弭，你要消弭它，那怨恨愈积愈深，这哪里是解决问题的办法。譬如今天讲的防恐，有很多人问我：法师，这防恐要到什么时候才能结束？我开玩笑的说，三百年。实际上三百年能不能结束？还是不能结束，为什么？因为你一防，那边攻，你一防，你两边是对立的，对立要是不能化解，这个对立是永远存在，矛盾永远不能化解，只有冤冤相报，愈报愈残酷，这是错误。怎么化解？不防了就化解；两边对立，我这一边不防，那一边就打不起来。宁愿自己再吃几次亏，再受几次灾难之后，人家就不打了。我打你，你不还手，就打不下去。我打，你还手，愈打愈起劲，不就这么个道理！
打不还手，骂不还口，立刻就解决。但是我这种解决的方法，没有人能接受。所以化解冲突一定从本身做起，不从外面。我这一生生活得很快乐，都是从佛法上学来的，毁谤我的人常常有，侮辱常常有，陷害也常常有，我都很快乐，我都很感恩，每天诵经念佛都给他们回向。凡是找麻烦的人，我都给他立一个长生牌位，这是什么？化解冲突，所以绝不是消弭冲突。绝对不能存有报复的念头，我们心开意解，非常快乐。你找我麻烦，这里不能住，那边有人欢迎我去住。这是老子所讲的“上善若水”，你这个地方障碍，我从旁边流，我不跟你发生对抗。这个路愈走愈广，愈走愈殊胜，才知道这是真正得到佛菩萨、圣贤教诲指导我们，我们的生活才能过得这么圆满。
方老师当年把佛法介绍给我，对我说“学佛是人生最高的享受”，我是听到这句话才走向佛门。在过去认为佛教是迷信，从来不进门，从来没有这个意念，说是问问佛是什么？都没有这个念头。“佛经是哲学里面最高峰（佛经哲学），学佛是人生最高的享受”，这两句话介绍我入佛门。同时他也告诉我，他说佛法不在寺庙，在哪里？在经典，这个指示非常正确。所以我这一生学佛是在经典里头学，不在寺庙，指导我的老师都是在家的。章嘉大师他是个出家人，时间很短，三年他老人家就圆寂了。
后来我跟李炳南老居士，我跟他学十年，十年离开之后，每次到台湾，我一定去看他，一直到他往生，所以我们保持非常好的师生关系。《无量寿经》，夏莲居的会集本是他交代给我的，我有使命弘传这部经典。所以过去有很多人反对，反对会集本，我不能动，如果说全世界的人反对，我一个人还要学下去，为什么？老师传的。如果我把它舍弃掉的话，人家会给我一个罪名，净空法师背师叛道，这个罪名就成立了。你可以反对，你不是李老师的学生，李老师没有把这个本子传授给你，你可以反对，我不可以。我是老师亲手把这本子传授给我的，我怎么可以反对？我要认真修行。
讲到这个地方，正好前天中国北方有个同学打电话给我，说有一位老居士（我现在还没问清楚是男的，是女的，不晓得），一生就是受持会集本，听我讲经的光盘，他很专，他就听《无量寿经》，就念阿弥陀佛，还学我念佛的腔调。我不是唱的，我念佛就是南无阿弥陀佛，南无阿弥陀佛，他就是用我这个声调去念，居然预知时至，坐着往生。他打电话告诉我，他说老居士已经坐了四十八个小时，现在还坐在那里。我听了这个事情，我说你有没有找新闻记者去看看？找电视台去拍拍这个新闻？他说去找了，找了之后，他说国内政策不报导这些，认为这个东西还是迷信。我说不要紧，你们自己晓得，录相机把他录下来，录下来送给我，我们自己华藏电视台可以播放。他告诉我录了。我说赶快去录，录了送过来。这说明什么？依照会集本修行，预知时至，坐着往生，这不是假的。反对的人你得要负因果责任，讲因果，各人因果各人负责。他做得对，做得错，都不必要干涉，各人因果各人负责，这是最正确的。（净空法师•答香港参学同修之二十—关于禽流感、忧郁症、自杀答问 2005/11/4）
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Technorati: Buddhism Buddha Buddhist Dharma Compassion Wisdom Religion Meditation Zen Philosophy Spirituality Inspiration Peace Insight
Sunday, January 24, 2010
A Dreamlike Song of Appearance-Emptiness
Appearances in samsara and nirvana, in all their variety,
Are appearance-emptiness, like a dream.
Appearances of enemies and friends, in all their variety,
Are appearance-emptiness, like a dream.
Appearances of joy and pain, in all their variety,
Are appearance-emptiness, like a dream.
Appearances of existence and nonexistence, in all their variety,
Are appearance-emptiness, like a dream.
Appearances of "it is" and "it is not," in all their variety,
Are appearance-emptiness, like a dream.
In sum, everything in samsara and nirvana
Is appearance-emptiness, like a dream.
When you know this, what you know is equality.
When you get used to this, equality is what you realize.
If you reflect well in this way,
That's contemplation on equality's meaning.
When you know appearance-emptiness, like an illusion,
You'll realize all the meanings of equality.
At Tekchok Ling in Nepal, Dechen Rangdrol spoke these verses extemporaneously to some Taiwanese disciples. [November 19, 2009.]
These verses were written down by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche and translated by Tyler Dewar of the Nitartha Translation Network.
~End of Post~
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Technorati: Buddhism Buddha Buddhist Dharma Compassion Wisdom Religion Meditation Zen Philosophy Spirituality Inspiration Peace Insight
Saturday, January 23, 2010
To Love Abundantly: Sharon Salzberg’s Journey on the Path
By Trish Deitch Rohrer
In 1971, a few days before eighteen-year-old Sharon Salzberg was meant to leave for India on an independent study salzberg-wordpressproject from State University at Buffalo where she was a student, she heard Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche was giving a talk in town, and she went to see him. After his talk, Trungpa Rinpoche asked for written questions, and Salzberg, who’d never meditated before, had one. “I wrote out, ‘I’m leaving for India in a few days to study meditation,’” Salzberg remembers. “‘Could you suggest where I might go?’” Hers happened to be one of the questions that Trungpa Rinpoche picked out of the large pile which had accumulated in front of him. “He read it out loud,” she says, “and he was silent for a moment. And then he said, ‘I think you had perhaps best follow the pretense of accident.’”
Salzberg laughs now, sitting on her couch on a bright fall morning in Barre, Massachusetts. She lives just through the woods from the Insight Meditation Society’s retreat center, which she co-founded in 1976 with Jack Kornfield-now the founder of Spirit Rock Meditation Center-and Joseph Goldstein, who lives next door to Salzberg on the property adjacent to IMS. Salzberg continues, “Trungpa Rinpoche gave me no map, no guidebook, no set of directions, no ‘Hey! My friend the lama is waiting to teach you on some mountaintop!’ There was nothing. And so I went to India, just like that.”
When asked if she knew what Chögyam Trungpa meant by “follow the pretense of accident,” she says, “No! It made no sense to me whatsoever! I thought, What does that mean?! But of course it’s exactly what unfolded. One thing led to another.”
When Salzberg was four, her father left her mother. When she was nine, her mother started hemorrhaging on the couch one night when only the two of them were home, and, though the little girl managed to call an ambulance before her mother bled to death, she died two weeks later. That night on the couch was the last time Salzberg saw her. A couple of years after that, Salzberg’s father-not the glamorous fellow she’d always imagined him-came to live with Salzberg and her grandmother, and six weeks later tried to kill himself with an overdose of pills. Eleven-year-old Sharon stood outside on the sidewalk as he was taken off in a stretcher to a psychiatric hospital. He never returned.
No one talked-ever-about any of what was happening to Salzberg: about all that profound loss and its attendant grief, shame, confusion and self-hatred. Maybe they did in whispers, but they stopped when she came into the room. So a consequence of the events of her childhood was that Salzberg felt left out of the flow of life. “Things were good for other people,” she says, “but not for me.”
About five years ago Salzberg, who had written two well- received books about Buddhism and was a teacher and inspiration to thousands of people, felt compelled to write a book about faith. Not many, however, were interested in supporting the project. Faith?! What does faith-a concept associated with theism-have to do with Buddhism? Still, Salzberg proceeded with her plan: she had a story to tell about faith in the context of her thirty-year experience as a Buddhist, and there was no way she could stop herself from doing it.
At sixteen Salzberg moved from Manhattan, where she lived with her grandmother, to Buffalo, and at seventeen, in an Asian studies class there, she heard the Buddha’s teachings for the first time.
“Here, finally,” she says, “was the Buddha saying what I longed for somebody to acknowledge: that there is suffering that exists.” Salzberg also heard the Buddha saying that no one is left out-not even Sharon Salzberg-of the possibility for the cessation of suffering. Something, in that moment, “ignited” in her.
“The Buddha’s vision of the possibility of what freedom could look like was…” Salzberg looks out the window, and says, “…tremendous.”
And so the sophomore in college, having it in her mind that Buddhist meditation was the one thing that could free her from her suffering, put together the independent study project to India, and following the pretense of accident as best she could, she set off to find a teacher.
In Salzberg’s kitchen at dinnertime, six friends are sitting around a long country table yakking away about not much, laughing, eating two kinds of ice cream and apple pie and expensive chocolates after a large meal of leftovers liberated from the industrial-sized, stainless steel refrigerators at IMS, where a handful of people are doing silent retreats.
Salzberg, though, is sitting in a chair just away from the table, in the corner, watching. Or maybe not watching-maybe she’s just being there-listening, kind of smiling, occasionally saying a few words and then falling silent again.
If you were angry, you might think she was angry; if you were sad, you might think she was sad; if you were lonely or bored or tired or scared or feeling above it all or deeply, deeply depressed or very happy, you might think she was that. Which means that Salzberg, doing nothing but quietly being there, is doing her work well: she’s being what Ram Dass says she is: a kalyanamitra, a “special friend,” a mirror that shows you-if you care to take a look on a dark Saturday night-your mind.
“This is not a drama queen,” says Michele Bohana, director of the Institute of Asian Democracy in Washington, D.C. “She has tremendous compassion, she’s extremely generous, she is a fabulous teacher, she has total commitment to the dharma, she’s extremely humble and there’s nothing fancy-schmancy about her-she’s very down to earth.” Bohana laughs. “Us American women?” she says, “We’re all very hyper. We’re all very, ‘Deadline, deadline, can’t talk now, call me back!’ Right? Well, she’s, ‘Gotta go practice.’ Quite the difference.”
Sunanda Markus, a consultant for Mirabai Bush’s Center for Contemplative Mind and Society, says, “She’s one of those people whose love of the dharma rings throughout every cell of her body. And she has an understanding that the dharma is really what has import. And that’s why she’s here. And why she went to India when she was eighteen. You might think I’m completely nuts,” Markus says, “but I actually believe that she has done many lifetimes of practice and is an incredibly evolved person.”
In Faith, Salzberg tells the story of arriving in Bodh-gaya in ‘71 and sitting next to a monk under the Bodhi tree where the Buddha was enlightened. The monk turned out to be one of the Dalai Lama’s teachers, Khunu Rinpoche.
“As I sat next to Khunu Rinpoche,” she writes, “I sensed deep within me the possibility of rising above the circumstances of my childhood, of defining myself by something other than my family’s painful struggles and its hardened tone of defeat. I recalled the resignation in my father’s eyes at the constraints that governed his life. The boundary of his autonomy was the decision about where to have lunch if someone took him out of the hospital on a pass. With a surge of conviction, I thought, But I am here, and I can learn to be truly free. I felt as if nothing and no one could take away the joy of that prospect.”
Salzberg traveled around India for a while in 1971, but couldn’t find anyone to teach her how to meditate. Finally, at a yoga conference she’d stumbled upon, she heard about a ten-day retreat in Bodh-gaya, led by a S.N. Goenka of Burma, who had started doing Vipassana meditation to cure his migraines. It was at this first retreat that Salzberg met a group of people who would become her longtime colleagues and friends: Joseph Goldstein, Ram Dass, Daniel Goleman, Mirabai Bush and Krishna Das.
“I had a great sense of discovery,” she says, “and homecoming and rightness at being there. As difficult as it was to do-I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t sit still, and a lot of uncomfortable feelings started to surface-I loved it. It was like falling in love. And, in a way, I’ve never veered from that. I do different practices or I approach the dharma in a different way, but that feeling hasn’t faded.
“I was working against so much unhappiness,” she says of her early practice, “trying to come out of it, that it was all me-me-me, all the way.” She laughs. “Perhaps it would have been healing to be able to reach out to help others, but I didn’t have it in me, even though I tried practicing generosity a lot.”
Salzberg stayed in India for a year and a half that trip, remaining in Bodh-gaya to do additional retreats with Goenka, and then moving on to meet and study with Tibetan teachers Kalu Rinpoche and the 16th Karmapa, Rigpe Dorje. But there was something in the simplicity of the Theravadan tradition of mindfulness practice that Salzberg was drawn back to. She was drawn back to Vipassana meditation, and a practice that Goenka introduced only at the end of Salzberg’s first retreat: metta-loving-kindness practice.
One thing that makes Salzberg different from many other Western students who sat at the feet of great Indian, Tibetan and Southeast Asian Buddhist teachers in the early 1970’s and brought what they taught back home, is that Salzberg embodies a very particular piece of the dharma puzzle. She stresses one thing: that in order to be free from suffering-and therefore to be able to give abundantly to others-one must endeavor to love oneself abundantly. Even for people whose lives have been less painful than Salzberg’s, the Buddha’s teachings on loving-kindness work to connect a person to their own heart and the hearts of all other beings without exception.
The day Salzberg sat under the Bodhi tree, she made a vow to herself: she vowed to learn to love as the Buddha loved. “Loving as the Buddha loved of course meant being able to love oneself as well,” she says in her living room. “It’s not really a question of, ‘May all sentient beings be free from suffering,’” she laughs, “‘-except for me.’ It has to include oneself.” The question was how to do that.
Salzberg met two female teachers in India during that first trip who became examples to her of people who had transformed their misfortune into abundant generosity and love. The first teacher was Dipa Ma, a tiny Indian housewife living with her daughter in the slums of Calcutta. Dipa Ma had gotten so sick she nearly died of grief after losing her husband and two of her three children. According to Salzberg, when someone told Dipa Ma that meditation might save her life, she crawled-because that’s the best she could do-up the steps of the meditation center to receive instruction. Salzberg related to this story-to the way Dipa Ma used her pain as motivation to liberate herself, and then to liberate others who suffer. The intensity of Dipa Ma’s motivation, Salzberg understood, was the key.
“Dipa Ma modeled the ability to transform one’s suffering-even immense suffering-into loving compassion.” Salzberg looks at you impishly-”I always knew I wanted to be that kind of person when I grew up.”
Then Salzberg tells the story of meeting a friend of Dipa Ma’s-another female Indian teacher whose father-in-law had forbidden her to meditate. “I asked her, ‘How did you accomplish what you needed to accomplish to be a teacher?’ and she said, ‘I was very mindful when I stirred the rice.’” Salzberg looks at you with soft green eyes, raises her eyebrows and smiles. She says, “I think we have the ability to seize that possibility for ourselves, and we don’t do it.”
Salzberg came back to the States in 1974, finished school, and-because Dipa Ma told her to, saying that Salzberg “really understood suffering”-she helped Joseph Goldstein teach a class in meditation at the Naropa Institute, which had just opened its doors in Boulder, Colorado. Though Salzberg was practicing, and now beginning to teach-and even starting to lead retreats-she was still incredibly hard on herself, full of self-judgment, “straining,” she says, all the time to change herself, be better, get somewhere with her practice. Ram Dass says of Salzberg in those years, “She was quite lost.”
Ram Dass agrees, however, with others who say that Salzberg must have built up stores of merit in other lifetimes, because, though lost, straining, self-critical and at first all for herself, she worked diligently to stay on a difficult path that would eventually have a huge impact on a lot of people. When she was only 23, she and Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein, joining with a group of friends, bought, with very little money, an old building from the Catholic Diocese, and started the now well-respected and very successful Insight Meditation Society.
It wasn’t until 1984 that Salzberg and Goldstein met Sayadaw U Pandita, the Theravadan teacher from Burma who would turn Salzberg’s life around once again. U Pandita had a reputation for being very, very difficult.
“Oh, boy-he was a tough guy,” says Ram Dass, who met U Pandita in Burma during an early retreat with Salzberg and Goldstein. Ram Dass laughs. “I was happy to leave there. I felt like I escaped.” Ram Dass says it was at this time, 1985, that Salzberg started doing metta intensively. “I watched her change,” he says. “She went from being in her mind, to being very soft, loving, sensual, actually. Because she was coming into herself.”
Between 1985 and 1991, U Pandita worked with Salzberg on two practices: mindfulness practice and loving-kindness practice. Though she’d been meditating for fourteen years, and had been at IMS for nine, it was a new beginning.
“I was seeing him six days a week when on intensive retreat,” Salzberg says, “and I’d go in for an interview, and describe something, and he’d say, ‘Well, in the beginning it can be like that,’ and I’d think, ‘I’m not a beginner!’” She laughs. “And I’d come in the next day and describe something completely different and he’d say, ‘Oh, in the beginning it can be like that.’ You know?!” Salzberg says, and, feigning infuriation, looks at you, “‘I’m not a beginner!’ And it went on that way for a very long time,” she says, “until I got it: It’s good to be a beginner. It’s good not to have all these ideas-‘I shouldn’t experience this, I should be doing more of that.’ It’s good to just see what’s there, to say, ‘Wow! Look at that!’”
One of the resident teachers at IMS, Amy Schmidt, is laughing about Salzberg. She’s remembering the time U Pandita came to IMS and made Salzberg slow down her mindfulness meditation to such a snail’s pace that sometimes she had to leave the shrine room two hours before lunch, in order to make it the fifty or so steps to the kitchen in time for the meal.
Salzberg rolls her eyes when she talks about this. “And there was Joseph,” she says, “walking around at his normal pace. I thought, ‘Why isn’t anybody doing this correctly but me?’”
U Pandita, though, obviously had something in mind for Salzberg. Again, he had her come in six days a week for interviews. The idea was that she would write down something she noticed about one meditation period per day, and one walking meditation.
“I’d go in there,” Salzberg says, “and before I could read my notes to describe my sitting and my walking, he’d say, ‘What did you experience when you washed your face?’ Which was nothing, because I hadn’t paid the least bit of attention to that.” Salzberg shakes her head. “And that was my interview. So I’d leave and I’d sit and walk and wash my face as mindfully as I could-I’d feel my hands in the water, and the water on my face-and I’d go in the next day and he’d say, ‘Tell me everything you noticed when you drank your cup of tea.’ Which was nothing.” Salzberg smiles, remembering.
Sometimes Salzberg would come into the room and bow to U Pandita and her hair would fall in her face and she’d brush it away with her hand and he’d say, “Did you note that?” “And I’d say, ‘No,’ and I wouldn’t get to read my sitting and walking notes that day either.” Salzberg called this experience the “torment of continuity,” but after a while she understood something more: where before she’d thought that meditation was what took place inside the shrine room, now she began to see that there was no difference between meditation and non-meditation. “We all have a tendency,” she says, “to think the real stuff happens in the meditation hall, and that if you’re drinking a cup of tea in the dining room and you get lost in a fantasy, the thing to do is throw the cup in the dishwasher and run back into the meditation hall to regroup. Well, that tendency for me was gone.
“The phrase that kept coming up in my mind during that retreat,” she says, “was from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, in which Suzuki Roshi says something like, ‘We practice not to attain buddhanature, but to express it.’ Finally I could just say, ‘O.K., I’m just expressing this right now, and right now, and right now.”
You walk with Salzberg through the woods from her house to IMS, and she just walks, hands in coat pockets, eyes on the ground. You take a stroll with her on a country road nearby, past horses, trees and a pond, and she just strolls. She’s not unfriendly-she tells stories and answers questions and smiles and laughs a lot-but she’s not busy building herself up, or entertaining you. The only thing you can do around her is let go of all expectation that something has to happen, that you have to be someone, that she has to respond as someone else.
In loving-kindness practice, a practitioner begins with him or herself, wishing four things: may I be free from danger, may I be happy, may I be healthy, may I live with ease. The practitioner then moves on to wish a “benefactor”-someone who has cared for them-the same four things. Then they make those aspirations for a good friend, then a neutral person-a person they normally ignore, like the counter person at the dry cleaner-then a difficult person, and then all beings without exception. If one were doing a metta retreat, one would do this practice using the same people over and over again.
“We tend to associate love or loving-kindness with a feeling or emotion,” Salzberg says, “but I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s something deeper-it’s really about being able to connect rather than exclude.”
Salzberg tells the story of the time when Joseph Goldstein went to see the 16th Karmapa in Sikkim. “He said that the Karmapa greeted his arrival as though it was just about the most important thing that had ever happened in his life. Which one guesses it was really not. And he did that not through great pomp and circumstance, but through an absolute fullness and completeness of attention. The presence Joseph felt was the feeling of being completely loved.”
Salzberg goes on: “And when Joseph told me this story, I felt quite regretful about all the encounters that I have where I’m kind of half there and half thinking about the next person I need to talk to, or the phone call I need to make. So the first thing is that gathering of energy-when I feel like my energy is somewhere else, I go…” here Salzberg looks at you gently, but with full attention. “Here we are,” she says.
Salzberg does not seem like the mushy type. She is not, as she puts it, “sweet and feeble-minded,” qualities people often think of when they hear the word “love.” When she is there with you, she is simply there, with no pretension, no elaboration, no show. When you e-mail her, she e-mails you right back. When you call her-and she gets dozens of calls a day-she returns the call.
Talking about loving-kindness practice, she says, “I really like the ‘neutral person’ part of the practice a lot. Because here’s this person that you don’t really know, you don’t have a story about them, you don’t know about their sorrows or their joys. But you pay attention to them every day, in effect, because you’re using them as an object of meditation, and wishing them well. And by virtue of the fact that you’re paying attention to somebody rather than overlooking them or ignoring them-suddenly there’s this real caring.
“A lot of the really charming stories of loving-kindness practice at IMS come out of that phase. People will be sitting and sitting and sitting and they’ll have a neutral person who’s also a meditator on retreat and they’ll say, ‘I don’t feel anything. I’m not doing this right. I’m not good at this.’ And one day I’ll get a note saying, ‘My neutral person didn’t show up at breakfast-could you please go up and check on them?’” Salzberg laughs. “You know? Like, ‘Yeah, right-your neutral person wants me banging on their door.’” Salzberg laughs again.
Salzberg did loving-kindness practice for four years with U Pandita, and then he wanted her to stop. Metta is not the main practice, he said, mindfulness is: metta will do many things, but it won’t necessarily enhance your understanding of emptiness. “It’s not,” Salzberg says, “a liberating practice.”
On retreat with U Pandita in Australia in the late eighties, then, Salzberg, who at this point thought she knew her mind, went back to mindfulness practice-and fell into a hole: feelings about her mother’s death she thought she’d worked through resurfaced. Miserable, she once again had to reweave the threads of connection from a lonely, desolate place. As a result, her compassion grew, first for herself, and then for everyone else.
Many of her friends can describe the change. Joseph Goldstein says, “When Sharon was just starting out, she was quite an unusual yogi-it was clear that there was wisdom there. But her teaching abilities weren’t clear at that time. Now, though, she has the confidence, and is wonderfully articulate, so the wisdom really shines through.”
Salzberg was riding in an elevator in a New York City hotel a few years ago, when she realized that she was carrying her very heavy suitcase in her arms. “I had the brilliant thought,” she says, “-‘Why not put it down, and let the elevator carry it?’” That’s what it’s like for Salzberg, finally: every moment now there’s another chance to let go-not to strain to be something better, not to strive to get over anything, not to practice life in any kind of harsh, judgmental, demanding or controlling way-but to just let go, moment after moment after moment. And in that moment of letting go is kindness.
“Even if I’m teaching people just to be with the breath,” she says, “my emphasis is that the critical moment in the practice is the moment we realize we’ve been distracted. We have a phenomenal ability to begin again-when we’ve gone off somewhere, we can begin again. And in that moment of beginning again, we can be practicing loving-kindness and forgiveness and patience and letting go. That was always taught to me,” she says, “but I couldn’t hear it. So maybe my evolution has been my ability to hear those words.”
In 1985, Salzberg and Goldstein were in Nepal together, when someone asked them if they’d like to go meet the great Tibetan teacher Dilgo Khentsye Rinpoche. “We were in Bodhnath, just hanging around,” Salzberg says, “and so we said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ you know, and we kind of went in and there he was in his state of half undress. He was eating lunch, or something like that. It was just the two of us and a translator and him, and he said, ‘Do you have anything you want to ask me?’ And we said, ‘No.’” Salzberg rocks backwards on the couch and laughs hard. “And he burst out laughing,” she says, “like, ‘You don’t know what you’re missing, you dunces!’ Six years later we were studying with Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and would have done anything to be in a room with Khentsye Rinpoche to ask him questions.”
Salzberg often tells these kind of self-deprecating stories, and you end up feeling great affection for her-she seems to have made as many mistakes as you, only she’s learned to laugh about them, tossing them off as teachings on how to give oneself a break.
Around 1991, twenty years after her first trip to India-and two years after she’d grappled, again, with the agony she felt at her mother’s death-Salzberg, still following the pretense of accident, “conceived an interest in Dzogchen”-the Tibetan Vajrayana practice of the Nyingma school. “It’s hard to even describe this,” she says, “but it was like a kind of craving, a yearning that came up. Some friends came by-students of Dilgo Khentsye Rinpoche’s-and I said, ‘Can you teach me?’ and of course they couldn’t.” She laughs. “‘Can you tell me something about it?’” she remembers saying then, “‘No.’” She laughs again. “And then Surya came.”
Salzberg asked Western Buddhist teacher Surya Das to give her some Dzogchen teachings, but he said it’d be better if he introduced Salzberg to his teachers. And that’s when she went to Nepal to meet Tulku Urgyen,and eventually to Paris where she met the late Nyoshul Khen, called “Khenpo” by his students.
Salzberg “fell in love” with Khenpo. She felt devoted to him, but it was a different kind of devotion than the one she felt for her earlier teachers. With Goenka, Dipa Ma and U Pandita, Salzberg felt a kind of dependency-after all, they were teaching very fundamental things, baby steps to being fully human. But Nyoshul Khen, up until his death in 2000, kept turning Salzberg’s attention to something she was overlooking-not his buddhanature, but hers.
“I had a different experience with him,” Salzberg says, “because I was a much more mature being at that point. I’d always been very devoted to my teachers. But with them the ground of my own self-respect was not that strong yet.”
In the last few months of Nyoshul Khen’s life, Salzberg kept looking to him as the person with the answers, with the strength, with the great love and wisdom. And he kept pointing her to herself for those things. “It turns out,” she says, “we look at the Buddha to see ourselves. And we look at ourselves, not to see ourselves as separate and more wonderful than anybody else.” She laughs. “But we look at ourselves and basically see everybody.”
Finally, after over thirty years of intense practice, of traveling all over the world and studying with what she calls an “ever-changing pantheon of teachers,” Salzberg allowed her teacher to show her what she’d vowed to learn under the Bodhi tree: faith in herself, and in her ability to love.
“From the point of view of the Buddhist teaching,” she says, “we all have that capacity to love. No experience of suffering, of loneliness or of unlovability we may have gone through or may yet go through can ever destroy that capacity. And that faith is the bedrock of loving-kindness. It’s faith in one’s buddhanature, in one’s awareness and the potential to love. It’s faith in an interconnected universe.”
Salzberg doesn’t think, at all, that this is the end of her path.
“I have definitely remade my life,” she says. “I’ve re-parented myself with my teachers, and I’ve found a home in the dharma, and have an amazing community of friends. I have practiced. But like any person, I’m not completely free. I do have faith, though, that any of us can be.”
Trish Deitch Rohrer is the former Executive Editor of Shambhala Sun.
Originally published in our January 2003 issue.
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Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Liao-Fan’s Four Lessons - The Fourth Lesson: The Benefit of the Virtue of Humility
Narrator: The third lesson taught us the ways to accumulate kind deeds. Naturally, it would be best if people would practice kindness, but as humans, we are social beings. It is impossible not to encounter others; therefore, it is important to know the ways to improve ourselves when interacting with others.
The best way to do this is to follow the virtue of humility. Humble people in society receive support and trust from the public. If they understand the virtue of humility, they also will understand the importance of constant self-improvement. This constant self-improvement not only includes the search for higher knowledge, but also encompasses the need to be more humane, to perform better in daily duties and to improve communication with friends.
Many benefits and rewards result from behaving with an understanding of humility. This lesson focuses on the benefits of virtue and humility, proven by Liao-Fan’s own experiences. A people will greatly benefit if they can thoroughly contemplate and understand these teachings.
Liao-Fan: In The I Ching/Book of Change, the hexagram of Humility stated…
Narrator: "The law of heaven takes from those who are arrogant and benefits those who are humble. The law of earth will not allow those who are conceited or self-content to always remain that way, but will bring change to them. The humble will not wither, but shall be replenished, just as flowing water fills lower places on the ground as it passes by. The law of spirits and gods brings harm to those who are arrogant and good fortune to those who are humble. Even the laws of people despise the arrogant and like the humble."
Liao-Fan: Therefore, earth, spirits, heaven, gods and people all prefer humility to arrogance. In The I Ching, Book of Change, the sixty-four hexagrams talk about the constant changes and interactions of heaven and earth, yin and yang. The book teaches a person how to become more humane. Every hexagram contains both good and bad outcomes.
The bad outcomes of a hexagram warn people to stop doing misdeeds and to practice kind deeds. The good outcomes of a hexagram encourage people to diligently improve themselves and strive to be better. Only the Humility hexagram contains all good outcomes and no bad outcomes. The Chinese Book of History has also said…
Narrator: "One’s arrogance will bring one harm; humility will bring one benefit."
Liao-Fan: I often went to take the exams accompanied by others and every time I would meet scholars who were very poor. I noticed that before they succeeded in passing the exams and became prosperous, their faces showed such humility, peace and harmony that I felt I could almost hold that quality in my hands.
Several years ago, I took my imperial exam in Beijing. Among the ten applicants from my village, Ching-Yu Ding was the youngest and extremely humble. I told one of the applicants, Jin-Po Fay, that this young man would definitely pass the exam this year. Jin-Po Fay asked…
Jin-Po: How can you tell?
Liao-Fan: I said, "Only those who are humble are qualified to receive good fortune. My friend, look at the ten of us; is there anyone as honest, generous and never tries to come in first, as Ching-Yu? Do you see anyone who is always respectful, tolerant, careful and humble like Ching-Yu? Do you see anyone like Ching-Yu, who, when insulted, does not talk back, or who, when slandered, does not argue? Any person who can achieve such a level of humility will receive protection from the earth, spirits and heavens. There is no reason he will not become prosperous."
Narrator: Sure enough, when the test results came out, Ching-Yu Ding passed.
Liao-Fan: One year in Beijing, I was staying with my childhood friend, Kai-Zhi Fung. I noticed that he always carried himself in a humble way with a kind and accommodating appearance. He was not a bit arrogant, which was an immense change from his childhood ways. Kai-Zhi had a friend named Ji-Yen Li who was straightforward and honest. Ji-Yen often scolded him on his mistakes, but Kai-Zhi always accepted the accusations calmly without talking back.
I told him, "Just as there are signs that warn of coming misfortune, we can see that prosperity comes to those who have cultivated the cause for it. Heaven will help those whose hearts are humble. You, my friend, will definitely pass the imperial examination this year!" Later, he indeed passed the exam.
There was a young man from Santong Province named Yu-Fong Zhou who passed the first level of imperial examinations before he was even twenty. Unfortunately, try as he might, he could not pass the succeeding exams. When his father was moved to another post in the government, Yu-Fong went with him, and came to greatly admire a well-known scholar in that village named Min-Wu Chian.
Yu-Fong brought his essays to this man. He had no idea that Mr. Chian would pick up his calligraphy brush and blot out his entire essay. Not only was Yu-Fong not angry, he sincerely accepted all of Mr. Chian’s corrections and immediately changed his paper accordingly.
Narrator: A young man who could be that humble and who showed such willingness to improve himself was very rare indeed. The following year, Yu-Fong passed the imperial examination.
Liao-Fan: One year, I went to the Capital to pay my respects to the Emperor. I met a scholar named Jian-Suo Hsia who had all the qualities of a great man without a trace of arrogance. I felt the intense aura of his virtue and humility all about him.
When I returned home, I told my friend, "When heaven wants a person to prosper, it will first bestow him with wisdom. Wisdom can make a person honest and well disciplined. Heaven has already bestowed Jian-Suo with wisdom, or he could not be that gentle, kind and good. Surely, heaven will now make him prosperous." Sure enough, when the test results came out, Jian-Suo had passed the exam.
There was a scholar named Wei-Yan Chang from Jiangying who was very learned and wrote good essays. He was also very well known among many scholars. One year he took his exam at Nanjing and stayed at a Taoist temple.
When the results were posted, he found that he had not passed the exam. He became furious and loudly accused the examiner of being blind for not recognizing his obvious talents. At that time, a Taoist monk stood by smiling and Wei-Yan immediately directed his anger towards the monk. The monk said…
Monk: Your essay must not be good!
Liao-Fan: Wei-Yan got even angrier.
Wei-Yan: How do you know it is not good when you have not even read it?
Monk: I often hear people say that the most important element in writing good essays is a peaceful heart and harmonious temperament. Your loud and angry accusations just now clearly show that your mind is certainly not at peace and your temperament is violent. How could you possibly write good essays?
Liao-Fan: Wei-Yan acceded to the Taoist monk’s words and in turn asked him for his advice. The monk said…
Monk: Whether you pass or not depends on your fate. If you are destined not to pass, then no matter how good your paper is, you will still fail the exam. You yourself will have to make a few changes!
Wei-Yan: How can I change something that is predestined?
Monk: Though the power to form your destiny lies in the heavens, the right to recreate it is in yourself. As long as you are willing to do kind deeds and cultivate hidden virtues, you will receive what you ask for.
Wei-Yan: I am only a poor scholar. What good deeds can I possibly do?
Monk: Practicing kind deeds and accumulating hidden virtues all stem from the heart. As long as you constantly harbor the intent to practice kindness and accumulate virtues, your merits will be infinite and boundless! Take the virtue of humility for example, it does not cost anything; why can’t you be humble and reflect on your own essay instead of blaming the examiner for being unfair?
Liao-Fan: Wei-Yan Chang listened to the Taoist monk and from then on, suppressed his arrogant ways. He became very mindful of his own actions and tried not to make mistakes. Everyday he put forth additional effort to do more good deeds and accumulate more merits.
Three years later, he dreamed one night that he entered a very tall house and saw a book that contained all the names of the applicants who passed the exam that year. He saw many blank lines. Unable to understand what it meant, he asked the person next to him…
Wei-Yan: What is this?
Person: This book contains all the names of the applicants who passed the exam this year.
Wei-Yan: Why does it have so many blank lines?
Person: The spirits of the underworld check on the applicants every three years. Only the names of those who practice kind deeds and do not make mistakes are allowed to appear in this book. The blank lines used to bear the names of those who were supposed to pass the exam, but due to their recent offenses, their names have been erased.
Liao-Fan: Then, pointing to a line, the person said…
Person: Ah-ha, for the past three years you have been very careful and have exerted such self-control that you have not made any mistakes. Perhaps you should fill this blank. I hope you will cherish this opportunity and take care not to make any mistakes!
Narrator: Sure enough, Wei-Yan passed the exam that year and placed 105th.
Liao-Fan: From the examples given above, we know that spirits and gods are always watching our behavior.
Narrator: Therefore, we must immediately do whatever is beneficial to others and avoid doing whatever is violent, dangerous or harmful to others. These are all things I can decide for myself. As long as I harbor good intentions; refrain from wrongdoings; do not offend the earth, spirits, heavens, and gods; humble myself; am tolerant and not arrogant; then the earth, spirits, heavens and gods will constantly have compassion for me. Only then will I have a foundation for my future prosperity.
Those who are full of conceit are definitely not destined to be great. Even if they do prosper, they will not be able to enjoy their good fortune for long. Intelligent people would definitely not make themselves small and narrow-minded and refuse the good fortune they are entitled to.
Narrator: Besides, those who are humble always increase their opportunities to learn. If a person were not humble, who would want to teach him or her? In addition, humble people are always willing to learn the strengths of others. When others perform good deeds, humble people will learn and follow their examples. In this way, the kind deeds that humble people can accomplish are boundless! For those who wish to cultivate and improve upon their virtues, they especially, cannot do without the virtue of humility.
Liao-Fan: The ancients had and an old saying…
Narrator: "Those who have their hearts set on attaining success and fame, will surely attain success and fame. Those who have their hearts set on attaining wealth and position, will surely attain wealth and position."
Liao-Fan: A person who has great and far-reaching goals is like a tree having roots. A tree with roots will eventually sprout into branches, leaves and flowers. A person who has set down great and far reaching goals must be humble in every thought and try to relieve another’s burden even if the occurrence is as insignificant as a speck of dust.
Narrator: If one can reach this level of humility, one will naturally touch the hearts of earth and heaven.
Liao-Fan: Furthermore, I am the creator of my own prosperity; if I truly want to create it, I will certainly succeed. Look at the applicants who sought fame and wealth. In the beginning, they did not harbor a sincere heart; it was only a passing notion. When they fancied it, they sought it. When their interest dropped, they stopped. Mencius once told Emperor Shuan Chi…
Mencius: Your Highness has a love for music. However, your love for music is only a personal pleasure. If you can expand from the heart, which seeks personal happiness to that of sharing happiness with all your subjects and make them just as happy as you are, then, surely the nation is bound to prosper!
Liao-Fan: I think it is the same for those who are seeking to improve their lives by changing their destiny. I, for example wanted to pass the imperial exams. If people can expand the heart to diligently do kind deeds, accumulate merits, and put forth their best efforts into character improvement, then both destiny and prosperity will be theirs to create.
(Article source: http://www.buddhanet.net/l4lesson.htm)
Contents
Introduction
First Lesson
Second Lesson
Third Lesson
Fourth Lesson
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