March 11, 2006

When a person around you has a fit of temper and is in a bad mood, it is because that he/she is relieving stress.  Many of the working people have enormous stress.  They can’t scold their boss or colleagues.  They can’t express their anger to other people.  What they can do is to tolerate it, then express their anger to the family members when they come home.  Some people love small animals very much but they might kick a cat as soon as they see one to express their stress when they are in a bad mood.  We are learning to be Buddha; we should learn how to “work together to benefit others” and try to understand what’s in others’ minds.  There must be a reason for him/her to do such thing today.  Maybe he/she is in a bad mood today or it is because of something else.  Therefore, we should treat those anxious living beings with compassion.

It is difficult to tame our mind.  But, mind won’t hurt people directly.  Therefore, even it is not easy to tame our mind but we can still restrain it.  We can control our body too.  Although we can’t stand a person any more, we can squeeze our hands instead of hitting that person because we still have a way to control our body.  But, it is the hardest problem is our speech!  It is not easy to control our speech.

I remember that I had a good schoolmate when I was in elementary school.  One day, I don’t remember why; we just didn’t want to talk to each other.  Then, she went home to southern Taiwan right after the beginning of our summer vacation.  Every time when she thought of me, she became more and more angry.  Finally, she wrote a letter to me and sent it through express mail from southern Taiwan to Taipei.  I remember that I didn’t wake up completely when I received that letter in the early morning but I woke up completely after reading her letter for five minutes.  I gave her a call afterwards and told her: “I don’t know that you are so good in writing.  I felt that you were scolding right in front of me while reading your letter.”  Because she didn’t want to talk to me, she expressed her dissatisfaction in writing.

I frequently say: “Don’t write any letter and don’t make any phone call while you are angry because you will do something wrong easily under that situation.”  While you are emotional, you express your emotion via language and in writing then you feel very comfortable after that.  You think that’s the way it should be and you get justified.  It seems that you are completely right.  But, in fact, you are just talking for yourself and you don’t even know you are hurting someone.  Therefore, you should be very careful in expressing your feeling with the pen. Because this pen is just like a sword, it will hurt people.  Our speech is extremely impure and it is not easy for us to keep quiet.  That is why no matter what level our practice is at, we will accumulate great merit when we practice in a temple because we can control ourselves better within these several hours while practicing inside the temple.  It doesn’t matter if you enter the Samadhi during the meditation or you are just sitting there for several hours.  At least, you can’t hurt anybody with your speech within that period of time.  Therefore, you still gain merit.

There were two wild geese and a turtle.  They lived close to a pond.  One year, it didn’t rain for a long time.  It was so dry that the pond was almost dried up.  If the pond dried up completely, the turtle would die.  Those two wild geese and the turtle were good friends so the geese said: “Hey, turtle!  The pond is almost dried up; therefore, we are going to fly to a place that has water.  Since we are worry about you, we are going to bring you along.”  The turtle said: “I also want to escape!  But I don’t have wings like you do and I can’t fly!  What should I do?”  The wild geese said: “It is very simple, we will hold each end of a stick with our mouth and you will bite into this stick with you mouth in the middle.  We will take you to a place where has water like this.  But you have to remember that no matter what happens on the way, you can’t talk at all.”  Then the turtle said: “It’s easy!  There is nothing easier than not to talk!”  Thus, those two wild geese held the stick with their mouth and carried that turtle flying in the sky.  When they were flying over a small town, the villagers saw them flying in the sky and said: “How come that turtle can fly?  This turtle must be different from other turtles.”  The other villager said: “No, it is just an ordinary turtle.  This turtle must be very lazy.  It doesn’t even want to crawl but asking these two wild geese to carry him around.”  The villagers started criticizing these three animals flying in the sky.  After hearing what they said, the turtle wanted to debate.  As soon as the turtle opened his mouth, he fell down to the ground and was killed.  This story gives us a big warning.  There is nothing to do with the people on the ground when you are flying in the sky.  Those people want to talk about you, so what?  You don’t want others to talk about you and you refute what they said yet the result is you are hurting yourself.  Learning Buddha Dharma is to learn how to control our conducts.  We will come across lots of this kind of tests while we are learning to conduct ourselves.

I often think that living beings’ organs grow very interestingly.  Our visual nerve is behind in our brain.  We see from behind in our brain first then to our eyes.  According to the medical science, our real eyes grow behind in our brain.  Therefore, our eyes should look inwards.  Because our eyes look behind from our brain, they should see what we think first that is seeing ourselves.  But, we are not like that.  Our eyes deceive us and we are looking outwards.  Why you deal with this matter this way not that way?  Why I take care of this matter this way but you don’t follow me?  This is because that our eyes are looking outwards for right and wrong.  Buddhism asserts that: “Don’t pay attention to whether others will or won’t do it; just focus on whether you will do it or not.”  It doesn’t matter of others’ right or wrong.  You should be aware of yourself.  Therefore, “Constant awareness keeps us away from ignorance; the world will naturally be peaceful.”  It is not easy to be aware of our ignorance.  We are aware of a part of our perception.  A blurry corner in our perception is the most vulnerable place to create numerous bad karmas and there are many such corners in our perception.  There is a corner that is totally insensible in our consciousness too.  Do we know what we are talking about?  What are we looking at?  And what are we listening to?  Therefore, our perception often deceive us.

We are unhappy and not satisfied because we often live in a comparing mood.  We ask others why?  But, when we reach certain age after absorbing lots of knowledge and understanding worldly causes and effects, we should ask ourselves why?  We can find the answer by ourselves.  Learning the Buddha Dharma is to find the answer by oneself.  You go to the temple to ask the master about something you don’t understand but what the master tells you are just some hints.  It all depends on how much you can contemplate and integrate into your daily life.  This is called “practice”.  Otherwise, you have attended lots of teachings but it just enriches your knowledge and your practice may not advance.

I hope that everyone, who attends this confession ceremony today, will learn from Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara to use the thousand eyes to observe the sufferings of the living beings and to use the thousand arms to support and help living beings.  But, Avalokiteshvara doesn’t have one thousand mouths.  Maybe in the future, there will be a Bodhisattva who has one thousand mouths.  His mouths are not for criticizing others but he vows to expound infinitely supreme Dharma to benefit living beings and to bestow extremely wonderful sound with his one thousand mouths to please all living beings.  If we haven’t reach this stage, then we should just vow to be a Bodhisattva with one thousand arms and one thousand eyes and don’t vow to be a Bodhisattva with one thousand mouths yet because it is not easy to discipline and to cultivate our speech.