If you open your heart and become like a child, you will always be blissful, always content. ~Dharma Mittra
The most exalted example Buddhists use to explain compassion is motherhood. Consider all that your mother probably has done for you since the time you were conceived — carrying you for 9 months, experiencing the hardship of labor and birth, feeding and clothing you, taking care of all your needs, and worrying about you long after you reach adulthood. Most mothers never stop caring unconditionally for their children. Regardless of whether one believes in reincarnation or not, one can suppose that all living beings are like mothers to us. The food that appears in front of us at dinner was grown, packaged, and prepared by people we probably do not know. The clothes we are wearing were produced by people we probably will never meet. Yet we are benefiting from their hopes, dreams, and labor. Plants, animals, and raw materials have all been used to provide us these things. This is the interdependence that characterizes life — no one thing exists by itself alone, or can survive alone. We are all part of one world ecology and the world is extremely compassionate to us.
ក្មេងៗហែលទឹកលេងនៅឃុំម្លូព្រៃ២ ស្រុកឆែប ខេត្តព្រះវិហារ ថ្ងៃទី២៥ ខែកក្កដា ឆ្នាំ២០១៧។ រូបថតអង្គការពន្លកខ្មែរ
RFA photo
by Ajahn Chah
Giving up the bad, practicing the good… this is the heart of Buddhism. Sabba-pāpassa akaranam – Not committing any wrongdoing, either through body, speech or mind. That’s the right practice, the teaching of the Buddhas. Now ”our cloth” is clean.
Then we have kusalassūpasampadā – making the mind virtuous and skillful. If the mind is virtuous and skillful we don’t have to take a bus all over the countryside looking for merit. Even sitting at home we can attain to merit. But most people just go looking for merit all over the countryside without giving up their vices. When they return home it’s empty-handed they go, back to their old sour faces. There they are washing the dishes with a sour face, so intent on cleaning the dishes. This is where people don’t look, they’re far away from merit.
We may know of these things, but we don’t really know if we don’t know within our own minds. Buddhism doesn’t enter our heart. If our mind is good and virtuous it is happy. There’s a smile in our heart. But most of us can hardly find time to smile, can we? We can only manage to smile when things go our way. Most people’s happiness depends on having things go to their liking. They have to have everybody in the world say only pleasant things. Is that how you find happiness? Is it possible to have everybody in the world say only pleasant things? If that’s how it is when will you ever find happiness?
We must use Dhamma to find happiness. Whatever it may be, whether right or wrong, don’t blindly cling to it. Just notice it then lay it down. When the mind is at ease then you can smile. The minute you become averse to something the mind goes bad. Then nothing is good at all.
Sacittapariyodapanam: Having cleared away impurities the mind is free of worries… peaceful, kind and virtuous. When the mind is radiant and has given up evil, there is ease at all times. The serene and peaceful mind is the true epitome of human achievement.
When others say things to our liking, we smile. If they say things that displease us we frown. How can we ever get others to say things only to our liking every single day? Is it possible? Even your own children… have they ever said things that displease you? Have you ever upset your parents? Not only other people, but even our own minds can upset us. Sometimes the things we ourselves think of are not pleasant. What can you do? You might be walking along and suddenly kick a tree stump… Thud!… ”Ouch!”… Where’s the problem? Who kicked who anyway? Who are you going to blame? It’s your own fault. Even our own mind can be displeasing to us. If you think about it, you’ll see that this is true. Sometimes we do things that even we don’t like. All you can say is ”Damn!”, there’s no-one else to blame.
Nothing Higher to Live For
A Buddhist View of Romantic Love
by Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano (Leonard Price) © 2005
If it is possible to live with a purpose, what should that purpose be? A purpose might be a guiding principle, a philosophy, or a value of sovereign importance that informs and directs our activities and thoughts. To have one is to live seriously — though not necessarily wisely — following some track, believing in a hub to the wheeling universe or a sea toward which we flow or an end before which all the hubbub of civilization subsides. What is your purpose, friend, or what should it be?
Perhaps most of us do not come to a clear conclusion in the matter, but this does not mean we have no purpose, only that we do not recognize it or admit it or even choose it for ourselves. In the unhappiest case nature simply takes its course, which is a turbid meandering through the swamps of desire. If life means nothing then only pleasure is worthwhile; or if life has meaning and we cannot get at it then still only enjoyment matters — such is the view of brutes and some sophisticated philosophers. It slips into the unconscious by default when we hold no other, but we are reluctant to entertain it and will rather, if we think about it, take as our purpose support of family, search for beauty, improvement of society, fame, self-expression, development of talent, and so on. But it might be fair to say that apart from these or beneath these the fundamental purpose of many of us is the search for love, particularly romantic love.
The love of a man for a woman and a woman for a man is often the floor to which people fall after the collapse of other dreams. It is held to be solid when nothing else is, and though it frequently gives way and dumps them into a basement of despair, it still enjoys a reputation of dependability. No matter that this reputation is illogical — it still flourishes and will continue to flourish regardless of what is said in any book. Love, or possibly the myth of love, is the first, last, and sometimes the only refuge of uncomprehending humanity. What else makes our hearts beat so fast? What else makes us swoon with feeling? What else renders us so intensely alive and aching? The search for love — the sublime, the nebulous, the consuming — remains sacred in a world that increasingly despises the sacred. When the heroic and the transcendental are but memories, when religious institutions fill up with bureaucrats and social scientists, when nobody believes there is a sky beyond the ceiling, then there seems no other escape from the prison of self than the abandon of love. With a gray age of spiritual deadness upon us, we love, or beg for love, or grieve for love. We have nothing higher to live for. Continue reading
