20150417人間菩提 ~ 誠心戒慎‧關懷天下Living with Vigilant Care and Sincere Piety
From the news we see that poor air quality has affected some areas in Taiwan. This is truly very worrying.
As I often say, living in this world, we are all interconnected and we all breathe the same air.
Buddhism speaks of the four elements. In fact, there are five. In addition to earth, water, fire, and air, there is also the fifth element of space, which refers to the space of the universe.
In the space of the universe, the air circulates around. So, it’s not that if you live in an area without any factories, the air you breathe is clean. It’s not so, because air flows around.
Taiwan is now suffering from water shortage, which has brought much inconvenience to many people in their daily living. So, please use water sparingly.
For decades, I’ve been calling on everyone to cherish water. But my words carry little weight. So, what I’ve said has little effect despite my effort to encourage people to save water for so many years.
That said, I’m very grateful to many Tzu Chi volunteers who have been reusing water for different purposes for a very long time. What they do is truly praise worthy. If everyone can conserve water by reusing it many times like that, a lot of water can be saved.
The government of Taiwan is now calling on people to save water and electricity and even offering incentives to people who do just that.
The government’s intention is very good but cherishing resources is our job and we shouldn’t do that for rewards.
Everyone should save water so we can go through this difficult time together. We should think in the long term, but not be short sighted.
The government’s intention is to remind us of the problem so we’ll be aware and cautious of our actions.
We should know that water resources of the Earth are limited. When it doesn’t rain and there isn’t enough water to use many people will pump underground water.
But water is limited. It’s best that everyone can live with vigilant care and sincere piety.
By that, I mean we should take good care of our minds, follow life’s principles to do good, have respect for ourselves and others, and keep our actions in check in our everyday life.
We should think about how we can best use our resources so we won’t overuse them and keep wasting them away. This is what we should constantly remind ourselves to do and mindfully cherish the resources we have.
We also see how our doctors dedicate themselves to safeguarding people’s lives with respect. In Taichung, a five-year-old girl suffers from a rare condition.
To pay for her medical bill, her father had to sell their house because the shots she got were not covered by the national health insurance.
Learning her condition, we gave the family a financial aid of NT$400,000 (around US$12,800). Our doctors from Tzu Chi Hospital in Taichung also went to visit the family.
They found that the girl’s grandfather is also ill. So, they asked him to go to our hospital for a thorough checkup.
This is how our doctors care for people with respect. Such love and respect is what we should inspire in everyone because the world we live in now is filled with much impurity which has worried many people.
Looking back to over ten years ago, there were the 911 attacks in 2001, the Iraq War in 2003, and the SARs outbreak also in 2003. During those years, these incidents had indeed worried people around the world.
That’s why I began expounding the Water Repentance text and encouraging everyone to repent deeply from their hearts.
I spent five years expounding the Water Repentance text. Throughout the years, we’ve been many disasters around the world, showing us that the world is indeed filled with much impurity.
How are we to eliminate the impurity from our world? At least we can start with changing our lifestyles through reducing our carbon emissions and conserving energy by saving water and electricity.
Only then can we help to mitigate disasters in the world. Moreover, we should not create more impurity through our unwholesome words and deeds, which will only bring fear to people’s minds and lead to dangerous consequences.
We see also a little Syrian girl who raised her arms to surrender as she mistook a camera for a gun. See how they live in fear like this.
What suffering it is. So, we must work to calm and purify people’s minds. Only when people’s minds are peaceful can there be harmony in society.
Every day, we pay close attention to events happening around the world. Thanks to modern technology, someone who has a tight daily schedule like me can learn about world events in a very short time.
So, I am very grateful to our Dai Ai News for allowing me to see what’s happening around the world every day.
The disasters I see remind me not to slack off. They also remind me that time is running out, but we still have much work to do.
Time keeps ticking away second by second and we can never ask for one second more. What we can do is to seize every second and live it to the fullest.
首頁 