20130829敬天愛地去奢靡 Reducing Waste to Respect and Love Mother Nature
A tropical cyclone is affecting Taiwan today. Though it’s only a tropical storm in intensity and its size is not very large, yet it brings with it a lot of rain. So, the weather bureau has been urging everyone that we must not take this typhoon lightly.
We need to be on our guard as it has thick clouds carrying a lot rain. I hope everyone can be prudent and sincerely pious and take precautions in the face of this tropical cyclone.
I’m very grateful to Tzu Chi volunteers around Taiwan for visiting our care recipients or particularly vulnerable families to help them prepare for the tropical cyclone, such as making sure their doors and windows are sturdy.
Our volunteers also brought them instant noodles. Indeed, as human beings, we should care for one another. The most important thing is for the entire public to have the awareness that we need to respect and love Mother Nature. When Nature’s cycles are orderly, the land will be safe and all on it will flourish.
As we humans live under the sky and on the land, our survival depends on Mother Nature. If Mother Nature is well and balanced, and if the land is well, to provide us abundant crops for food, won’t we be able to lead a life of security and happiness?
However, people nowadays are used to a standard of living that is actually indulgent and wasteful--- wasting food and using disposable products. You see how we’re using up and wasting the resources of our planet.
No wonder that researchers declared that August 20 is Earth Overshoot Day, a day where humanity exhausted nature’s budget for the year. In the long run, how much resource can the Earth continue to provide for us?
Right now, the human population has already surpassed 7 billion. On this planet, the natural environment is slowly being destroyed as people pave over natural lands with concrete and build high-rises on it imagine, when it rains, the ability of the earth to absorb the water has been ruined, because such big extents of land have been covered by concrete.
This is as if our skin is being covered with plastic or wrapped up in something impermeable. Imagine how uncomfortable this is! If our skin cannot transpire or absorb the natural air, how could we be healthy? We’ll get ill
On top of that, so many disasters are happening around the world. We see forests being destroyed not only by human activities, but also by forest fires that occur due to extreme weather. With vast forestlands being scorched like this, isn’t this severe damage to the land?
The land to Mother Nature is like the skin to our body. So, the “skin” of the Earth is now badly damaged. Such fire disaster is one of the Three Major Calamities that are happening in our world.
More than two thousand years ago, the Buddha could see that in the future, as people’s afflictions and delusions cause them to create negative karma, that will result in major calamities: the natural disasters of floods, storms, and fires.
However, we know now that we have to add earthquakes to the list. In recent years there have been many earthquakes. Living in the world, our sphere of life is plagued by these natural disasters. Now is really the time we must wake up. With these alarming disasters, everyone should wake up to the warnings Mother Nature is sending us.
I’ve been calling for people’s attention to this on a daily basis, but what I see from the news is that many people still haven’t woken up. Civil war is still going on in several countries and various actions are triggering international fury. This is really concerning because internal strife grows into threats from external factors.
Seeing such imbalance of people’s hearts, my heart is heavy with sorrow. So, we really need spread the wholesome seeds of love quickly and widely (for the needs are great). Everyone really needs to take the Buddha’s teachings to heart deeply as food for our wisdom-life.
In Japan, there is a man that had stayed in Taiwan before and had visited Tzu Chi. After learning how Tzu Chi’s members worldwide are dedicating themselves for the good of the world, he was very moved.
When re returned to Japan, he visited the Tzu Chi office in Japan. Our staff shared with him about Tzu Chi’s missions including how there is a youth group of college students, called Tzu Ching. This man then invited our Tzu Chings to work in the rice fields with him to plant rice and learn about what hard work farming entails.
It was through this experience that these young people learned how every rice grain is hard to come by and started to cherish their food (and not waste it). Young people nowadays are very wasteful and don’t cherish what they have because they don’t know all the hard work involved to produce everything they have.
So, we’ve been continually promoting eating just to be 80% full and helping others with the 20% we save. This helps us to not be wasteful, but at the same time, we can help others while still taking in enough nutrition to maintain our own health.
In conclusion, we need to be more self-disciplined and need to care for Mother Earth. The land has already suffered serious damage and the climate is so unbalanced now. See, last week, a tropical cyclone called Trami affected Taiwan and now, just a week later, another tropical cyclone has come, called Kong-rey.
We really need to be sincerely vigilant and self-disciplined. Please don’t go up in the mountains and stay away from the waterfront. May we all sincerely pray with humble piety for the typhoon to remain offshore, so that all land areas can remain safe and well. We really need to pray with true sincerity.
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