Life Wisdom: Learning the Dharma to be Awakened
The Dharma is to exist in the world and it needs people to pass it on so that the Dharma can stay in the world forever. Yet, how many people can vow to do this? After they’ve made their vows, will them last life after life?
For ordinary beings, their thoughts are fleeting, so, it’s easy for them to make an aspiration, but hard to keep it forever. It is easy to make an aspiration and vow, but to actually carry it out is indeed very difficult. Hence, listening to the Dharma is easy but carrying out one’s vows is hard.
The Buddha has wisdom and compassion. The Buddha’s hope is for everyone to aspire and vow to engage in serving the Saha world. The Saha world needs bodhisattvas, so, the one great purpose of the Buddha’s coming to the world is to teach the Bodhisattva Way.
Everyone, I always call people “bodhisattvas”, hoping that it’ll be true one day. I anticipate that as I keep calling everyone bodhisattvas, hopefully, as the term enters through the ears, it’ll go into their eighth consciousness, and travel through to their ninth consciousness. Then, it’ll set off their pure and untainted Buddha nature and the compassion to willingly give of themselves for the suffering beings in the world. Such willingness is full of delight.
When we do something willingly and delightfully, we’ll not shy away from difficulties. Hence, even the difficulties become reasons for us to feel delightful when we serve willingly. Even though serving others is hard work, and we face others who are stubborn and difficult to deal with, we still do not feel dreadful about it, because we have Great Love that is selfless.
The heart of a Bodhisattva is like the heart of a parent. The hearts of parents and Bodhisattvas are also like that of the Buddha. To emulate the spirit of the Buddha, we must learn and become awakened. The Chinese character “to awaken” contains the word “to see”, which means purifying our hearts and seeing our innate nature. Before we awaken, we must emulate the Buddha, which is to follow the Buddha’s examples and teachings.
The Buddha is our role model; to emulate him, we must follow his examples and learn how to face people, how to notice people’s suffering, how to inspire people’s compassion within them, and how to go amongst people and serve. In fact, if we have not awakened, we’d not know what true compassion is. An awakened person can have compassion from the bottom of his heart. Because living beings are pitiful, living bodhisattvas give rise to their compassion.
Like the grand lessons that I’ve often talked about now, to be applicable to the time we are in, at this moment, there is something I must say. What is it that I have to say? Vegetarianism is a must. To know what vegetarianism is about, it takes everyone to think mindfully. Being a vegetarian is about eating clean food such as grain food crops.
I’ve kept saying that vegetables and fruits have their unique aroma and they are something we can eat. They taste sweet and smell great, and their flavor is truly wonderful. There are varieties of vegetarian food to choose from, so why do people choose to eat flesh of animals that are raised in an unclean environment? Animals have been fed with food that people don’t eat and are cruelly slaughtered for their flesh by humans.
Their flesh is cruelly cut into pieces of meat, and people put them into their mouth, one piece after another. Why do people do this? Such an eating habit is because of people’s deluded thinking which is distorted and ignorant. All this is to satisfy our cravings for meat in the few seconds in our mouth.
So, I have to continuously say these words again and again. I keep hoping that volunteers can become vegetarian. I keep saying that we must eat a vegetarian diet. So, of course, I myself eat a vegetarian diet.
Do other people, volunteers, find it necessary to eat a vegetarian diet? Volunteers, ordinary beings lead an ignorant and deluded life. We need to mindfully learn and see principles so that we are not those stubborn and ignorant children in the burning house. We should awaken and see principles. We must open our eyes and see principles. This is being awakened.
Volunteers, I hope volunteers around the world can hear my talk. Through listening, they see principles, thus become awakened. So, awakening comes from listening to and seeing principles. Through learning, we awaken. Right now, we need to get out of the burning house. To truly awaken, we must absorb the Dharma into our hearts.
What I hope to see the most is volunteers grow in wisdom and strengthen their vows. This is being awakened. Having spoken so much, I still want to say thank you to volunteers and sincerely give my blessings to all the volunteers around the world. I hope everyone be safe and well and make more aspiration and vows, and what’s needed even more is to carry them out in action.
Only by taking steps can we make progress. Focusing our mind on spiritual cultivation is being diligent. Staying focused and moving forward and never regressing is called being diligent. Only when we learn the Dharma in this way will we be awakened.
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