Life Wisdom: Competing with Time
Under the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s the economic downturn. We see that across the world, a lot more people are in hardship when compared to previous years. We also saw news of abnormal climate conditions; people suffer from flood, wildfires, and storms. When the water element is out of balance, flood occurs; all the crops are destroyed and people’s houses are inundated. This is the kind of disastrous situation people would face when flood occurs.
Especially, we’ve seen wildfires (in the U.S.), acres of forest land are still burning, this has been carrying on for months, and is still burning. Humans depend on land for survival. Such a large scale of land has been burned. Did the wildfires really start up naturally by themselves? Or, could it be that someone carelessly started a little spark which turned into huge fires? The wildfires look truly shocking and scary. Not only is the land burned, the air is also much polluted. While the land is burned, the air also becomes polluted. Besides, the land that people live on is also damaged, and people’s ways of living are greatly impacted.
However, we humans have yet to awaken; we do not realize how tiny we are, so we are always arrogant. When people become ambitious, greed grows inside them. Driven by greed, they want to get and own everything. If people couldn’t do this, they would become angry. Because of greed and anger, if they failed to get what they wanted, they would get angry, and this leads to people fighting over things. People fight over land, get into conflicts, hurt one another, and nature is damaged as a result along with these major human tragedies; humans have caused so many disasters in the world.
In the world, there is the imbalance of nature’s four elements; for human’s heart, there is the desire of greed, anger, and ignorance which are hard to eliminate. People get tangled up with time and places constantly, and this originates from the heart. Otherwise, time and space also follow the law of nature. If humans can awaken, and know clearly about the law of nature, they’ll know that birth, aging, illness, and death will happen, and in the end, they too will die. A person can only live for several decades. Have you thought about that? One second is so short, it is fleeting. Let us fuss over every second and minute; in order to be diligent, we must fuss over time. Let us not fuss over with people matter, but with time. The Buddha says that in life, we are to compete with time. If we know how to do this, we know how to live our life. It is rare to be born and live as humans; as we have this physical body to learn the Dharma, how can we not compete with time? This is because everything is accomplished through time. When our direction is correct, let us seize time as well as our direction, and never let a second go idle by. This is to compete with time. This is what the Buddha taught us.
Life is impermanent, and time flies. As we’re born as humans and have encountered the Dharma, if we don’t awaken in this life, in which future lives will we awaken? Now that we have this body and the rare opportunity to learn the Dharma, what is even more rare is that we are walking the Bodhisattva Path and carrying out the Dharma.
Over 2,500 years ago, the Buddha came to this world. The Buddha talked about his one great purpose. Recently, I’ve often talked about this, his one great purpose is to teach the Bodhisattva Way, which is to guide people to awaken and to devote themselves to helping living beings in suffering in this world. This is being a bodhisattva who reaches out to people in suffering and helps them.
Look at how much suffering there is in this world. There are so many people in suffering. Some people are so poor that they have no rice to eat, not even one grain of rice. The food Tzu Chi volunteers provide is the most needed for the poor families.
They need food to live. After they receive the food, they are happy as they have a chance to live. Oftentimes, my mind thinks about the story of a family. Volunteers gave food and rice to a poor family. A child in the family was so happy that he went to bed holding a sack of rice and fell asleep with a smile. Imagining the scene, it makes me feel that what more should we ask for in life? What do we seek after? How much do we need for us to be satisfied? It turns out that when one’s heart is pure and untainted, one can be easily satisfied.
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