Master's Dharma Talk: Inspiring People to Pave the Bodhisattva Path Together

Volunteers, seeing all of you cultivating yourselves so diligently makes me truly happy. This is the best offering to me. It brings me more joy to hear that everyone is very mindful in serving the community as a living bodhisattva.

 In my recent Dharma talks, I expounded the chapter of Peaceful Practices in the Lotus Sutra. The Lotus Sutra teaches us how to cultivate ourselves by going amongst people, which is very important. Going amongst people, we can see that despite having ignorance, everyone has the Buddha nature.

 I often say that people’s hearts are filled with ignorance and afflictions. They don’t know how they were born and where they would go after they die. They live each life like this in ignorance going through the cycle of life and death. All the karma they create is stored in their eighth consciousness. All their good karma is stored there too. The eight consciousness is a storage of both negative and positive karmic seeds.

 As we do less bad deeds, more good affinities will come. Therefore, we must make the most of our time to take the Dharma to heart and use our time to benefit all living beings. With his compassion, the Buddha hopes that we can understand the great way of the Truth. After we understand his teachings, we should aspire to enlightenment while making efforts to benefit others.

We should not just focus on benefiting ourselves by understanding the Dharma and gain joy from it. Such joy will pass. If something happens and we are unhappy about it, we give rise to afflictions. Then, we waste our time producing afflictions and create negative karma. This is why it is easy to fall when we only focus on benefiting ourselves in spiritual cultivation.

The Buddha wants us to understand his teachings. If we do, then we need to go amongst people to understand the origin of afflictions. In recent days, I have been emphasizing this so that the Dharma will be ingrained in everyone’s heart and etch in everyone’s memory.

It is important to recollect the Dharma. If we don’t interact with people and avoid dealing with people and matters, our mind will become dull and our memory will deteriorate. This is why we should seize our time to serve. Where do we serve? We serve amongst people. By going amongst people, we can see the source of much ignorance; we can see how afflictions arise.

When we listen to someone’s problem and afflictions, we can use the Dharma we have learned to see where his problem lies and solve it with the Dharma. This is how we apply the Dharma we have learned to enlighten others. When we do this, we need to recollect the Dharma we’ve learned. By recollecting the Dharma, naturally, the Dharma will stay in our memory. This requires going amongst people.

I hear that volunteers hold Dharma study group at our recycling station. People can grow their wisdom by coming in contact with the Dharma. I am very happy to hear about the study group. The elderly volunteers in Donggang’s recycling station are so full of joy. They showed me the blower they made. They attached a paper roll to a straw. When they blow in the straw, it rolls out. This means that they have good lung function.

There is also a volunteer named Mr. Liu. Over 20 years ago he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

“The medication did not help. When I collect plastic bags, I hold four large bags in my right hand and four large bags in my left hand. I collect all the bags on this street on my own, rain or shine, even in bad weather. My Parkinson’s has gotten better,” said Mr. Liu Zheng-he.

By doing recycling he has become more agile. He’s been doing this for more than 20 years. I am truly happy to see this. It’s remarkable. I can share his story with many people. That’s right, we must let people in our communities know about the Bodhisattva path. Whether it is taking care of elderly or doing recycling work to protect Mother Earth, we can invite residents in the community to join us and then inspire them to cultivate spiritually so that they would pave this path.

Tzu Chi paves a path. We hope that everyone can reach out his or her hands and bend down to pave a straight and smooth path which heads in the right direction and leads ordinary people to walk the Bodhisattva Path. We can pave this path so that it is easy to walk on. I hope everyone can learn more Dharma and form more positive affinities with people. When going amongst people, we need to be a person with enlightened love.

Our heart is like a room. We should fill this room with compassion. “Dwelling in the abode of great compassion” means that we fill our heart with compassion. This is emulating the Buddha’s heart. When we take the Buddha into our heart, we have the heart of the Buddha. With the Buddha’s heart, we must go amongst people.

When going amongst people, the most important thing is to be gentle and forbearing as there will be a lot of ignorance and afflictions. How do we deal with this? There are methods, such as the Four Bodhisattva Practices and the Four Rules. The Four Bodhisattva Practices entails cultivating diligently without interruption over eons of time, cultivating both blessings and wisdom, and cultivating respectfulness.

 If we can put these methods in our heart, then we will always be cultivating ourselves. Naturally, our action, speech, thoughts will be purified and with making great vows, that’s the Four Rules. When we apply these in our everyday life, our every thought will be on the Buddha; every step we take will be on the Bodhisattva Path.  We must pave this path for the world and guide everyone to participate in paving this path together. Then, this path will be smooth.