20141011To Contribute to the Common Good
Look at the National Day celebration yesterday, also known as Double Ten Day, in Taiwan. In the plaza in front of the Presidential Office, many groups gave beautiful and orderly presentations. That should be enough for a celebration. However, Taiwan still had National Day fireworks.
We should know that all the money spent on these fireworks in fact went to waste because off setting off the fireworks only creates several seconds of visual art. Every display of fireworks creates a huge waste of resources. Most important, fireworks pollute the air. When rounds of fireworks are fired into the sky, they produce tremendous pollution.
The manufacturing process of the fireworks also greatly pollutes the environment. With this holiday long weekend, popular areas are filled with people, as they all use their holiday to go out and travel. Some people commented that their going out only got themselves lost in the crowd. Their sightseeing caught only sight of people and cars everywhere (instead of beautiful scenery).
Look at the huge traffic created. Just the exhaust from these cars is a serious air pollution. More holidays create more carbon footprint and more consumption, which creates more garbage (These are some negative consequences of having many holidays). We also saw people going over mountain cliffs to clean up after tourists. See how they risk their lives to collect litter. I truly feel for them.
For the sake of sightseeing and fun during the holidays, people travelled to remote scenic areas and left behind their garbage. The cleaning crew has to put their lives in danger to keep the environment clean. I often ask myself why people behave the way they do (It brings no benefit but problems). It would be much better if we spend our holiday time doing things that protect the environment.
In Wuhan of China’s Hubei Province, Tzu Chi volunteers are promoting recycling. They led a group of college students to nearby stores inviting business owners to join our effort. Can you save all the unwanted bottles and cans for us to collect? We do recycling every Saturday on the plaza. They visited every store nearby telling the owners the concept of environmental protection, asking them to keep the recyclables clean and to save them for us to collect.
They also encouraged the owners to use less plastic products and other goods that harm the environment. They even held an event at the plaza to raise environment awareness among residents. These young people are doing good deeds. We get our friends to care about the environment by doing what we can and recycling in our community.
This benefits the public. See, these students did not follow the trend of going sightseeing on holidays like most people and creating garbage. They chose to attend Tzu Chi’s activity to learn how to protect our environment and understand more about garbage’s harmful impact to our Earth and how to recycle, to conserve energy and reduce carbon emissions.
These college students who are highly educated took in these concepts and started doing recycling in their community. See how wonderful it is (for them to inspire others to do good deeds to benefit our world).
We also see a poor village in Indonesia. Due to recent drought, their land is not producing food. The villagers are even worse off, so Tzu Chi volunteers went to this remote village stricken by poverty to distribute rice. This is the work of love. Tzu Chi volunteers deliver their love globally.
Yesterday afternoon, a research vessel sank off the coast of Lungmen, which is part of Taiwan’s Penghu Islands. The Coast Guard Administration contacted Tzu Chi for assistance and Tzu Chi volunteers quickly went to help by delivering ginger tea and a complete set of dry clothes for the people who were soaking wet after being rescued from the ocean.
The dry clothes we prepared included underwear so that right after being rescued they’d be able to change out of their wet clothes and into dry ones to stay warm. We also provided them hot meals. Tzu Chi volunteers also visited and offered care to the injured sent to hospitals, even before their families had arrived. The love and care delivered by Tzu Chi volunteers is very touching.
This is a network of love in action. We often see this network of love, rising out of working with each other. As we can see, the disequilibrium in Nature really causes much hardship. Natural disasters are causing suffering. Man-made crises be it due to oppression, conflict, or violence, create much suffering.
Accidents that happen in a split second be it in the sky or in the sea with the sudden sinking of a ship or crashing of a plane (also bring suffering). All these different events create harm and devastation for human beings. So we really ought to learn to ground ourselves center our minds and do what is right and prudent.
See, when it’s holidays, some use the time to learn the Dharma, or offer care to the underprivileged or disadvantaged or do recycling. All these are positive contributions to the common good. But some people choose to pass their time by doing nothing or going sightseeing, creating mass crowds and producing serious carbon emissions and air pollution.
While out, they also litter, creating a lot of garbage. Everyone is a human on this planet, why such different vision and mindset? Why such a different in behavior? We really need to educate the public just like the way the Buddha tireless kept trying to educate living beings by using parables and all sorts of methods. In a word, now is really time for us human beings to wake up and step out of our delusions.
In each and every one of us, we have an enlightened nature with boundless wisdom. So, in truth, every single one of us is capable of great wisdom. We are all, in fact, rich with wisdom. But what blocks us is that we reject the Dharma. We don’t hold it to heart, so we become poor. We let ourselves become very spiritually impoverished. When, in fact, we are rich to begin with. We have great inner riches.
This is what we should really seek in life. This is the Truth we should seek and it is the true spiritual wealth we can have. It is attained by learning and living out the Dharma.
首頁 