| Use Time as Your Spiritual Cultivation Ground | ||||||||
| By Dharma Master Cheng Yen Translated by Teresa Chang | ||||||||
My first thought when I wake up each morning is always one of thankfulness. I am thankful that I have passed another day safe and sound, and that I can still freely move my hands and feet. Then I tell myself I must put this brand-new day to the best use. Time flies, and we all age with it. Young children grow to be adults, and adults grow to be old people. Such is the immutable cycle of nature. As we grow older, our energy declines and our bodily functions weaken. Referring to this, the Great Conduct Bodhisattva says, “With another day gone, our lives become shorter. We’re like fish in a pond with diminishing water. What joy is there in this?” He urges us to bear life’s impermanence in mind and make the best use of our time. While our physical life slips away second by second, our wisdom-life can grow with the passing time. With time, we can accomplish many things. We must constantly remind ourselves that it is rare in the cycle of reincarnation to be born as a human and to learn Buddhism. Since we’re fortunate to have both, we should live every second with pious sincerity and vigilant care, stride on the Bodhisattva Path, and never let our time pass in vain. Let us treat time as our spiritual cultivation ground and make the most of every second to grow in wisdom. Instead of making good use of their short time here in this world, many people spend their lives pursuing pleasures and indulging in consumerism. To satisfy their endless desires, they use many resources in the world and ultimately cause damage to the Earth. We must remember that while time can be used to sow blessings, it can also be used to accumulate bad karma. Our mindset determines whether we do good or do bad. Let us open our minds’ eyes to thoroughly perceive the Four Noble Truths—Suffering, the Cause of Suffering, the Cessation of Suffering, and the Path leading to this emancipation—and realize that our cravings only lead to negative karma and suffering. Let us turn our endless desire into a loving heart that finds joy in giving, and do what we can to help others. When we listen to the Dharma [the Buddha’s teachings] and take it to heart, our wisdom grows and the ignorance and afflictions in our minds decrease. To help other people benefit from the Dharma too, we should share it with them. Only then will our path to enlightenment be more meaningful.
Live out the Dharma Tzu Chi conducts blessing ceremonies at the end of every Chinese lunar year. This year, over 100,000 people attended 53 such ceremonies held around Taiwan. Though the weather was very cold, my heart was warmed seeing so many people attending the ceremonies in such unity and order. I heard many heartwarming stories as I traveled around to this year’s blessing ceremonies. I heard one of them in Yilan County, northern Taiwan. Chen A-cong (陳阿欉), a resident of Daxi, Yilan, was close to 80 years old. He said that he’d been in the fish business all his life and had earned a lot of money from it. The first floor of his house even served as a small fish factory. However, he knew that he couldn’t keep the money he made forever. He also didn’t want to continue making money off fish anymore—he’d learned the importance of protecting life and Nature when he was introduced to Tzu Chi. That was why he agreed when his three daughters proposed using the first floor of his house to do good. At their suggestion, he turned that space into a Tzu Chi recycling station, and then as a gathering place for local volunteers. He has not only offered his house to be used as a place to inspire more people in the local community to give, but he himself, despite his advanced age, has also started training to be a certified Tzu Chi volunteer and pledged to do good in the spirit of a bodhisattva. I saw newly certified volunteers at our blessing ceremonies putting on sutra presentations on stage while senior volunteers in the audience sang and gestured along in unison. I was deeply moved as I watched their synchronized movements and listened to their resonant singing. Such unity and harmony showed how everyone had listened to my teachings and taken them deeply to heart.
I hope that the hearts of all Tzu Chi volunteers are equally unified and that their minds are tranquil, free of the clutter of ignorance and delusions. I sincerely hope that everyone embraces correct beliefs and thoughts and puts their compassion into action by relieving less fortunate people from suffering. I always encourage every certified Tzu Chi commissioner and Tzu Cheng Faith Corps member to emulate the Buddha’s heart and carry out my mission as their own. What is the Buddha’s heart? The Buddha said, “The mind, the Buddha, and living beings—there is no difference among these three.” Every one of us has the same purity of heart and compassion as the Buddha. When we tap into that inner goodness and contribute to the welfare of mankind, we’ll help many people. When we truly take in the Buddha’s teachings and live them out, we’ll be able to inspire many people to join us in doing good. I hope every Tzu Chi office and gathering place serves as a very good spiritual cultivation ground where our volunteers, with the utmost sincerity, work to bring out the love in people and inspire them to walk on the Bodhisattva Path. Spreading love Over 5,000 people in Taiwan were certified as Tzu Chi volunteers during our year-end blessing ceremonies this year. They all vowed to emulate the compassion of the bodhisattvas and to give of themselves to make the world better. I admire their commitment, and in them I see the beauty and kindness of Taiwan. Bodhisattvas embrace all human beings, and they never discriminate against anyone when providing aid. As soon as they hear calls for help, they go to the aid of the people in distress—regardless of their skin color, race, or nationality. When a disaster occurs, our volunteers pay their own way to go on relief missions to help those stricken, whether in their own country or abroad. Rendering help in a disaster area can be hard work, but our volunteers never complain of being tired. Instead, they express gratitude for having the opportunity to give to the victims. I often hear our volunteers in Taiwan unanimously voice the same sentiments after witnessing suffering in a foreign land: “Taiwan is a very blessed place. We should count our blessings and be thankful that we have the ability to help others.” The world would be a blissful Pure Land if the people in it loved each other more, if peace prevailed, and if all living creatures could coexist in harmony. However, we see conflicts erupting in many parts of the world because the minds of a small number of people are out of balance. Their selfish desires lead them to clash with others, eventually resulting in devastating wars or conflicts that take heavy tolls in human lives and lay waste to countless homes. Those areas are thus turned into hells on Earth. Unbalanced minds are actually more worrisome than the imbalance of the Four Elements of Earth, Water, Fire and Wind, which gives rise to natural disasters. When a natural disaster strikes, the impacted area will eventually be rebuilt and the victims’ lives return to normal, as long as people pool together their love and help those who are afflicted. However, it is often very difficult to heal people’s traumatized minds or resolve conflicts or wars when people’s unhealthy mindsets lead to tragic man-made disasters. Syria is an example. The civil war in that country has been raging for three years now. Each day, more and more people lose beloved family members to the conflict. In order to stay alive, countless Syrians have abandoned their homes and fled to other countries. Sadly, the road to safety has also been full of bloodshed, as some have been shot before they reached a neighboring country that would shelter them. Even those who were lucky enough to reach safety sometimes sustained injuries and had to have limbs amputated. Even if they escaped unscathed, some of them have had to endure the pain and torture of being separated from or losing their loved ones. What torment they must have to endure. Lily Ramin is a Tzu Chi commissioner from Jordan. She shared with me the sad story of one Syrian refugee. A woman who was about to give birth fled from Syria with her husband and children. Unfortunately, her husband and kids were killed before they reached safety. The woman herself was full of bullet fragments when she reached the border of Lebanon. Doctors tried to save her life but failed. Nevertheless, they succeeded in delivering the baby via cesarean section. Later, one of the doctors gave the baby to a friend of his who had been married for over ten years but had no child. That friend was Lily’s son-in-law. Lily thus became the baby’s grandmother. Over the past two years, Tzu Chi has been shipping clothes and daily supplies from Taiwan to Jordan to help local impoverished people and Syrian refugees. Among the shipped goods were baby shoes made by nuns at our Jing Si Abode. The first pair of shoes Lily put on her grandchild came from our Abode. Lily’s father was from Armenia. Born in Palestine, Lily originally lived in West Jerusalem but later moved to East Jerusalem. In 1969, the Six-Day War between Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Syria broke out, and East Jerusalem, which had been captured and annexed by Jordan after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, was captured by Israel. The place where Lily used to live thus became a foreign country to her and she needed a visa to visit it. Lily said that because her father was an Armenian refugee and she herself a Palestinian refugee, she can empathize with the Syrian refugees in Jordan. That’s why she has been able to sympathetically render long-term care to them along with other Tzu Chi volunteers in Jordan. Our volunteers in Jordan have been able to give love and material aid to needy people and Syrian refugees because of the emotional and material support from Taiwan, where Tzu Chi originated. The volunteers took the ideals of our foundation to Jordan, and they have lived them out by reaching out to the less fortunate there. Although Taiwan is small in area, its love and kindness know no bounds and have been rippling far and wide.
Tzu Chi will soon celebrate its 48th anniversary. Our volunteers have been spreading love around the world for nearly half a century, regardless of national borders, religions or races. In addition to aiding the poor and needy, they also work to bring out the Great Love intrinsic in people. They know that when everyone puts their love into action, the suffering in the world will be alleviated. I hope we continue to put forth our best effort to help make the world a better place to live.
Learning and cultivating ourselves in society Christopher Yang (楊凱丞), whose Dharma name is Cheng Yuan (誠愿), is an 11-year-old Tzu Chi volunteer born in the United States. He shared on his blog what he had learned from visiting an observatory high up on a mountain with his family. In his blog he drew a mountain and a path leading to the summit, with a helicopter next to it. He compared the summit to people’s pure innate nature, also known as the buddha-nature, and the path to the Bodhisattva Path. He also likened the helicopter to people’s desire to get to the top as soon as possible. He wrote: “The Master tells us that wisdom only comes from experience. If you take a helicopter to the top, you will not be able to see the scenery along the way. The scenery can be likened to what you experience on the Bodhisattva Path. Without that life experience, without personally going through it all, you cannot learn and grow in wisdom. True wisdom can only be attained when we take one solid step after another on the Bodhisattva Path, learn from the good examples we encounter, and refrain from repeating the mistakes of the bad examples. In other words, reaching the summit by helicopter is not a solid experience because one does not go through the most important part of walking the Bodhisattva Path, of going amongst the people to learn from them and cultivate oneself.” Cheng Yuan means that a spiritual practitioner must enter into society and get close to all kinds of people to gain solid spiritual training. Only when people do that will their commitment to follow the Buddha’s way remain firm; only when they do that will they be able to help themselves and others attain enlightenment. It is truly impressive for an eleven-year-old to have such a deep realization. This goes to show that everyone has the same buddha-nature as the Buddha and that regardless of one’s age, regardless of whether one is an ordinary person or an enlightened being, we all have inner purity and wisdom commensurate with that possessed by the Enlightened One. Every one of us has an inherent good nature, but that nature can be easily clouded by the bad karma we create and by the ignorance and delusions we accumulate through every unwholesome thought, word or action. On top of that, we all bring to this life the karma we created in our previous lives. Thus we tend to become deluded and get caught up in negative thinking, with the result that our minds are beleaguered by all sorts of afflictions. We live in a world full of suffering, some of which arises from illness, and some from the constantly changing circumstances in the world and the impermanence of life. But as long as we can come to a true realization of the Four Noble Truths, we’ll be able to let go of all painful attachments and attain peace of mind. Furthermore, we need to realize that everything is due to the karmic law of cause and effect. When we realize that, we’ll learn to live every second with vigilant care and pious sincerity and prevent ourselves from sowing seeds of bad karma. Keep in mind that the best place for self-cultivation is amongst people. Exposure to different circumstances helps us reflect on ourselves, and giving love to others helps us grow. When we give love to the suffering, we must also love ourselves—by cherishing our wisdom-life and persisting in the right direction. If we don’t do so, we will become lost in afflictions and wrong thoughts, and our life will pass in vain. Guo Jin-chun (郭金春) is a Tzu Chi volunteer who lives in Taichung, central Taiwan. He used to be a heavy drinker and smoker. He often got so drunk that he’d fall unconscious on the roadside. He also often lost his temper at his family without any reason. Sometimes he even became violent towards them. During his rages, he broke several television sets by throwing them on the floor. When his wife tried to talk him out of drinking, he brandished a knife and threatened to kill her. Fortunately, three years ago, a light shone into his life. He was introduced to Tzu Chi and began volunteering at a recycling station. He got up very early every morning to listen to my Dharma talks. The positive influence he was exposed to finally made him decide to quit drinking. However, quitting alcohol was as hard for him as breaking a drug addiction. When the urge to drink came, he would bite on empty wine bottles to resist it. He broke two teeth as a result. I asked him why he didn’t have his teeth fixed. He said he wanted to use them as a reminder of what a huge effort it was to finally give up drinking. He wanted to keep himself from going back to the wrong path. He is truly reborn now. As he sincerely repented of his past wrongdoings, he pledged to adhere to the Bodhisattva Path and be a positive influence in the lives of others too. His example shows that when you take in the Buddha’s teachings and seize the time to apply them in your daily life, you will stop afflictions and delusions from arising and multiplying. You will eventually change your life for the better and give rise to countless seeds of goodness.
None of us can take our wealth with us when we depart from this world. The only thing that will follow us is our karma. The value of life does not lie in how much wealth we accumulate or how high a social status we attain, but in the contributions we make to mankind. I hope everyone will put their kind thoughts into action and gain peace of mind by giving to others. Let us be ever more mindful. |
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