Lecturer: Master Zheng-Yan
Subject: Cultivate Kindness to Receive Great Benefits (懷忍心慈)
We should always be in accord with the principles. We must always contemplate the karmic retributions of all our conduct. Train the body and mind with loving-kindness and do not become lax. Enable others to practice and gain great joy and benefits.
This tells us that our minds and actions must always be in accord with principles. We must always contemplate this. I remain everyone of cause and effect each morning. Evil conduct begets suffering; kind conduct begets blessings. This is an unchanging law of the world.
So we must always nurture our loving-kindness. We must have compassion in our hearts. Thus, I often tell everyone to keep the Buddha in your mind. Then the Dharma exists in your actions. So the Dharma helps us train the mind and develop our great kindness and compassion. We must not slack off. Since we are engaged in spiritual practice, the mind is our training ground, so we mustn’t allow the mind to become lax.
We should diligently cultivate our kindness; if we can do so, we can achieve self-realization and guide others. Won’t this be a great benefit for all? Such great joy and benefits come from helping oneself and others. With just a thought of loving-kindness, we will not give rise to thoughts of harming or killing others. Our thoughts are very important. I hope everyone possesses the power of love and kindness in his or her heart. This is the most crucial thought in our diligent practice.
In practice, we must always nurture kindness and not give rise to thoughts of harming or killing others. Then, we can achieve self-realization and can guide others as well.
Yesterday we mentioned that as ordinary people, most of us forget our previous lives after rebirth. In this life, we have forgotten those we loved, those who did so much for us in our past life. We no longer recognize our parents or siblings. They may have become our enemies in this life, so now we harm each other. This may also happen. Thoughts of causing harm to others will arise in our mind.
Since Beginningless Time, all sentient beings have been our parents, siblings and family. With karmic causes and conditions, we transmigrate in the Six Realms. With each rebirth, our forms change according to our retribution, and we no longer recognize each other. When we harm others or consume their flesh we severely damage our loving-kindness.
Nowadays, we often hear about competition. When people compete, they oppose each other. There is competition among businesses. We also hear people say that a child who is too well-behaved will not be able to compete with others in the future. It appears that in order to survive, one must compete and fight with others. So, we must raise our awareness, because the people with whom we compete may be our siblings, parents, relatives, etc., from our previous lives.
After we are reborn we become deluded and repeatedly try to harm them. Some people kill animals and consume their flesh. All animals with movement and feelings possess Buddha-nature. Though rats, oxen, tigers and rabbits all have different forms, they are all living beings. They seek to survive and fear death.
So we often speak of respecting life. We must love all beings unconditionally, and respect everything that possesses life. They have the right to live. We humans are the most intelligent of all beings. We must love other beings unconditionally; this is our basic responsibility as humans. Unconditional love is kindness to all. If we continue to harm and kill for food, we severely damage the kindness in our hearts. We must always think about these principles. We must always contemplate the principle of respecting life. We should love all beings, then we can safeguard our heart of kindness and benefit sentient beings.
The passage in the text continues on to say, “Buddha said, before eating others, consider whether you are starved enough to eat your own child.”
The Buddha told us that before eating animals, we should consider whether we are starving. Starvation occurs with famine, when drought causes all vegetation to stop growing. Then people starve as they have no food. I have mentioned before that for crops to grow they need the four elements of soil, water, sunlight and good air. But with an imbalance in the climate, there is a lack of rain, and drought occurs.
In the past few decades, the Gansu Province of China has suffered from lack of water. They depend on a rainy season for water. This rainy season is between May and September. If there is no rain or insufficient rain, there will not even be potable water for people, let alone for irrigation crops. So we assisted them by creating water-cellars, similar to wells that can store rain water. If they are able to store ten tons of water during each rainy season, it is enough for them to drink and to water their plants.
Nowadays we water our plants with automatic irrigation systems.
The pipes carry the water to the fields, and with the push of a button, water flows out. Each section of the field has a sprinkler head. It is very convenient. We can use pipes and motors to pump the water however far we need and irrigate the land however much we want.
But in Gan-su Province, it is very difficult to carry water from their cellars to the crops. They use buckets to haul the water, and carry it out to the fields to irrigate them. They use drinking cups to water only around the perimeter of their seeds, which is only a few inches in diameter. Only the surface of the soil is moistened. Their water situation is very difficult, but they are very content and grateful for the 6,000-7,000 water-cellars we built. Over the past decade, we have built them in one town after another.
Now over 6,000 families have them. They are very grateful for this. But recently, the rainy season has not been on time, and there is insufficient water. Do their water-cellars fill up each year? In 2007, it did not rain between May and July, and only a small amount of rain fell in August and September. This was truly worrisome. I continued to tell the honorary board members and the construction commissioners that even with the water-cellars, they still cannot live if it does not rain. So I hope to relocate these villages to places closer to the river. We should put forth more effort so they can survive generation after generation. This way, the younger people will not need to leave their homes and their elderly parents to find work, living apart from their families for years. The elderly will not be left behind on their own to care for their grandchildren. And, the children will not be without and education.
So, I hope to relocate them from the mountains so the children can go to school, the parents can find jobs nearby, and the elders can have a chance to live more comfortably. But now, they are still facing the water problem. In the mountains, we have prioritized villages that are severely affected by drought as the first to be relocated. The local [government] is providing land close to the Yellow River. Though we say it is close, it is still far. But it is closer than the mountain. Now, in mainland China, they us electricity to pump water from one level of storage up to other levels. With all these levels, water can be transported from the river to the areas where it is needed. Then their lives will not be so hard.
So now we are again appealing to everyone for help. Drops of water can from a river, grains of rice accumulate into a bushel. For those who have water to drink or no water to farm their crops, we must find ways to help. This is what we are diligently working on now.
In the text, the Buddha said “Before eating others, consider whether you are starved enough to eat your own child.”
“Others” means non-humans, in other words, animals. If we are about eat animals, slaughter them and eat them, we should ask ourselves whether we are starved enough to kill and eat the flesh of our own children. With His wisdom, the Buddha made such an analogy. Does the meat on our plates perhaps belong to our most beloved child or family member in one of our past lives? We now live in abundance and can eat anything in any we desire. We can fry or boil, even skin or cook animals alive. We should consider whether the era of famine that Buddha described, where people eat their own children, may someday arrive. It may.
During the war, during World War II, I was still very young, but I understood what people were saying, what people returned from Hainan island said. During the war, the Japanese would send Taiwanese there as soldiers. At that time, that place was on the front lines. After eight years of war, these exhausted soldiers escaped. However, they could not find any food to eat. They cut off the flesh of corpses that had not rotted and cooked them for food. Even those who eventually died from hunger during the journey become food for those who had survived. When others asked about the flavor of human flesh, they said it was salty and hard; it tasted awful. These words still echo in my ears. This happened in my childhood, right after World War II. When these military laborers returned, they spoke of escaping from the island and eating human flesh. This was not too long ago. World War II was only 50-60 years ago.
Everyone, we should truly cherish life. To do so, we must safeguard our minds. If we can gather blessings together, benevolence will accumulate. Then naturally the climate will be favorable. With blessings, the weather will be mind.
Everyone, take care of your minds and contemplate the principles of karmic retribution. Train the body and mind with loving-kindness and do not become lax. Enable others to practice and gain great joy and benefits. I hope we can all practice, and gather together our blessings and benevolence. So, please always be mindful.
首頁 
