Teaching of our mentor
Author: Fafu
Translator : Lotus
How excellent the wisdom and transcendent power of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are! Because when you have wisdom, you can understand everything, when you have the transcendent power, you can do everything. How ease and happy you will be! Then will it be necessary for you to do work every day? Couldn’t you produce some bread out of nothing? In fact, if sentient beings have no wisdom, the more they do, the worse they are. Not to mention the superior bodhisattvas who have the top transcendent power, even the less great devas don’t need to cook, wash and clean by themselves each day. You almost can’t finish doing all these things during a day. Apart from these, you have to work. The purpose of your work is to get food, clothes and house. People are almost being busy during the whole day. What do you busy yourself with? Useless things. Compared with the transcendent power in yourself which you don’t reveal and use, you prefer to be busy with something else. What can you get through it? Very little. How little is it? Extremely little. But you think you are right and good. Sometimes you are not in good condition, yet you have to pretend to be good before others. Remember that the sentient beings in the phenomenal worlds are like this, foolish and pitiable. If you often consider the two aspects repeatedly, you will extremely treasure and desire this Dharma, and then you will be easy to understand the Dharma and enter the state of it. This is the key point. Because the Sages were interested in this Dharma, they achieved these merits and virtues. We should think what we are interested in. It will benefit us if we are really like the Sages.
Try your best to think “what have I done during a whole day?” You can reckon what you can obtain through the continuous work in your whole life. During the delusive pursuit, we haven’t obtained the true pleasure and ease. Why aren’t we in pursuit of the transcendent power of the buddhas? From the beginning of the time to present, we have chased delusive things such as food, drink and play in one life after another, but what result we get? All we get is the temporary self-deception. After eating, how much does the feeling of it remain? Can you still remember what you ate today of last year? Can you still remember what you ate today of the year before last? You can’t. You can’t remember that kind of delusive and illusive feeling. From the beginning of immeasurable kalpas to the present, in one life after another, we have chased food, drink and play, and we are still doing this like before. We do so much in a day just for the food, clothes and house, but they disappear in a flash. We have chased them continuously, but they have disappeared continuously, so this is called chasing the illusions. Illusion means that you can see and feel it at that time but they will disappear subsequently just like the vanishing taste of the food eaten in our mouths and the nice feeling of wearing beautiful clothes in our bodies, which we think we possess and can feel and then we chase. You can find that the taste of food eaten in your mouth will be gone and none of it will remain after a few minutes or a few hours. When it is gone, you will put food in your mouth again. You put food in your mouth and put on clothes on your body all year round, then you will clear the rubbish produced by the body every day. The sentient beings have been chasing like this from limitless kalpas to present. Don’t they feel hard?
If you really cultivate well, you can obtain whatever you want. We don’t talk the merit of the transcendent power but the blessing of normal people like Buffett, who made so much money by means of buying and selling stocks and has saved so many poor sentient beings. Though he himself economizes on food and other things, he has saved so many people. We repeatedly say we practice the path of the Bodhisattvas and act like the buddhas, but how many things have we really done? Remember that the Buddhas’ teachings don’t lie in the words and expression but in what you can really finish doing. Do you continue to chase illusory things which will lead you to live helplessly and uncomfortably for all lifetimes or make a decision from now on, plant a good root, build up good condition and then you will achieve good result?
