20130930悲智足跡印邊地 Providing Relief with Compassion and Wisdom
Truly, seeing the victims in Nigeria carried out on stretchers one by one and knowing that they are all students… Fifty have died. Their college was suddenly attacked by gunmen. What brought this on? Actually, there’s no real issue of substance. It’s only the gunmen’s way of thinking which caused lives to be taken away just like that. This is heartbreaking.
Pakistan is also in a similar situation. Born into this world, we human beings should live in peace with one another. With Nature in balance, providing a good environment to live in, why do people not live in harmony? Why commit such violent acts and cause harm, chaos, and turmoil? Actually, Pakistan has been suffering greatly recently, with one crisis after another.
Violent attacks and bombings are already frequent, along with natural disasters. A major earthquake on Sept. 24 caused widespread disaster. However, relief groups have difficulty reaching the area. No one dares to go because separatist militants control the region and make attacks on incoming groups. The area is in a very volatile condition.
We also see formation and destruction happening in the same instant. The earthquake caused buildings to collapse, but in the same moment, it caused a small island to form. This is the way of things in the world… as the Buddha said, all material things go through formation, continuation, decay, and annihilation. There is constant turnover, nothing is permanent. But humans cause much of the destruction.
While natural disasters have already caused unbearable hardship for people, conflicts and fighting in recent days are preventing relief workers from helping people suffering from the earthquakes. Aircrafts delivering air-drop supplies have come under fire. Cycles of disaster and resulting suffering go on without relief in sight.
Now on top of that, there are car bomb attacks taking place. Imagine what it is like to be born and raised in such a country. It must be hardship beyond what words can describe. Seeing them suffer so much pains me very much.
But we see that our volunteers delivered heartwarming care to people in Suqian, Jiangsu. To prepare for our upcoming winter distribution, volunteers began making home visits and assessment. We see that in life, some suffer multiple hardships, being old, lining in poverty, and living alone. So, Tzu Chi volunteers with their love went to visit and assess their needs to prepare aid materials for them.
Also, we see in the news our nurses and doctors in Tzu-Chi Dialysis Centre in Kedah, Malaysia not only provide dialysis to patients with love. The nurses also went to visit patients at home one by one to understand their living conditions. Besides providing them medical care, our nurses introduced Tzu Chi and gave patients coin banks to inspire their kind thoughts and good deeds.
They’re doing medical and charity work together. After the home visits, our nurses felt very grateful because seeing their patients’ hardship has inspired them to do more to help. Seeing their services touches me very much. This is called “enlightened love”.
But the impurities in people’s hearts will lead them to create unrest, violence, and suffering in this world. People in the many countries I mentioned before are afflicted. That’s why they caused such crises that destroyed families and society. The sufferings in this world all originate from people’s hearts going astray.
Being afflicted, they create negative karma, which builds up into collective negative karma that leads to a society of endless unrest. But when people turn their hearts around to have enlightened love like our volunteers, they can reach remote areas to assess needs and to give care to people in need.
They prepare winter aid distributions so that the people in need can survive the harsh winter. Seeing our volunteers carry out very good planning and assessment, I praise them for their good work.
We saw, in the Philippines, how there are truly many impoverished people. So I am truly very grateful to the Council of Agriculture in Taiwan for providing Tzu Chi with 3,500 metric tons of rice this year, that we can distribute to the needy in ten countries. Look at the joy of the people when they received the rice. The elderly woman we saw is living in a rundown van.
She is over 80 years old but still sells jasmine flowers by the road to make a living. At the rice store, if someone drops some rice on the ground when they measure it, she will pick it up grain by grain. She says that her parents taught her this way.
My parents taught me not to be wasteful since every grain of rice is very precious. So I can’t let any grain of rice remain on the ground and be stepped on. So I take these grains and wash them and put them together with rice I buy.
Just by picking up rice on the ground, she can collect enough for a small bag of rice. This makes her very content and grateful. You see, a life in poverty is very difficult, but in the midst of her poverty, she still abides by ethics. Indeed, we should follow the principle of not wasting even a single grain of rice. When she received two bags of rice from Tzu Chi, she was deeply grateful.
I am so happy to get the rice from Tzu Chi. I am very grateful and feel very fortunate. This rice will feed us for several weeks. Thank you for coming to give help to us poor people.
There’s also our aid to Lesotho. The blankets made out of recycled PET bottles that our recycling volunteers in Taiwan helped collect and sort were sent to Lesotho and distributed to the people in need to keep them warm through the winter. See how grateful they are Receiving the aid from Tzu Chi, they know that the rice is from Taiwan. They are all very grateful and shout out Thank you Taiwan. Aid recipients in every country are all like this.
Amituofo. Thank you, Taiwan Tzu Chi. Love from Taiwan, thank you.
We need to be grateful to the volunteers in every country who started Tzu Chi locally for not forgetting that the origins of all this was Taiwan. The love of Tzu Chi volunteers is now in so many countries around the world. The 3,500 metric tons of rice from Taiwan this years were able to benefit people in ten countries only because there are local Tzu Chi volunteers in these countries, making it possible for us to reach the people in need. I’m truly grateful
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