DHARMA IN EVERYDAY LIFE

By Nhat Quan

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Living in the modern era, makes people think too much. The more you think, the more confused your mind becomes, making it impossible to live in peace. If you think a little less, your mind will definitely be at peace, and you will live more comfortably. So the question arises:

- How to achieve a state of Peace of Mind

According to the Sutra: Metta Sutta, that is the Sutra of Loving Kindness, the Buddha taught:

- Those who want to attain peace should often learn to be straightforward, and humble, and know how to use loving language, those people know how to live simply and happily, with a peaceful and calm lifestyle, have few desires, and do not follow the crowd.

Those people will not do anything that the wise can laugh at. And this is what they always keep in mind:

- May all people and all species live in safety and happiness, with a gentle and peaceful mind.

- May all living beings on earth live in peace. Weak beings, strong beings, tall beings, short beings, big beings, small beings, beings we can see, beings we cannot see, beings near, beings far, beings that have been born, and beings that are about to be born.

- May no being kill any being, no being take lightly the life of another, no being out of anger or malice wish for anyone to suffer and be miserable.

- Like a mother who is protecting her only child with her life. Let us treat all beings with compassion.

According to the Sutra, if you want to have a peaceful mind, you should use your limitless compassion to cover the whole world and all beings, compassion that is not separated by anything, your mind is no longer entangled with resentment or hatred. At any time, when walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, as long as you are awake, you vow to maintain within you the mindfulness of compassion. A life of compassion is the most beautiful life. When one does not fall into wrong views, gradually eliminates desires, lives a healthy life, and attains wisdom, one will surely transcend birth and death.

The Discourse on Loving Kindness is one of the most famous suttas of the Buddha. It is found in the oldest chapters of the Pali Canon and is considered by all scholars to be the authentic teachings of the Buddha.

This short sutta discusses three areas of the Buddha's teachings, known in Pali as:

- Sila,

- Samadhi and

- Panna,

 Often translated as:

- Sila

- Concentration, and

- Wisdom.

In Buddhist terminology, wisdom is synonymous with inner insight and is always referred to as the absolute truth, or ultimate reality. Therefore this sutta shows you the way from the life of a common mortal to the state of supreme enlightenment. The sutra leads you to that peace of mind through the path of love. In this sutra, you hear about a feeling for all living beings, a feeling described as the love of a mother. Motherly love is just a metaphor, describing a life of love, regardless of whether it is of a man or a woman. So the Buddha does not only talk about what love should be, he also shows you how to practice it. Everyone wants the world:

- No war, no conflict, love, and happiness among all people...

These wonderful things, you know very well, but how to realize them? That is the crucial issue, how to express thoughts into actions, and that is why this sutra is called the way to realize.

If you are aware that peace of mind is your purpose in life, then you need to work towards achieving it. To determine this, you need to reflect on:

- Is peace of mind your purpose in life?

- Do you understand your purpose in life?

- Do you want to make a lot of money or have a certain status?

- Do you want to be rich or famous? Or perhaps you simply want to find interesting things in life?

Or:

- Do you just want peace of mind?

Be honest, what are you looking for?

- Do you want to achieve all your material dreams and then have peace of mind?

- Is that possible? Is finding what is truly most important in life really that important?

If you still think that you can do whatever you dream of and eventually peace of mind will come about somehow, then it is time for you to wake up.

Of course, peace means the end of war, and you may believe that one day everyone will enjoy peace. However, that dream of paradise will hardly come true unless you start from within yourself. Peace in your mind means something completely different from peace in politics. If people in the world had peace in their minds, they would never kill each other. True peace can only begin from within you and is the result of personal effort. An interesting thing is mentioned in the first sentence of the sutra:

- Peace of mind cannot come naturally. Peace of mind requires an effort aimed at certain inner attitudes.

Sometimes the idea of ​​a peaceful mind is taken to mean a state of indifference. While meditation itself requires a lot of effort. If you try to achieve a peaceful mind by isolating yourself from others, you will not find peace but only a feeling of indifference, which can easily lead to cynicism and pessimism. Whereas a peaceful mind is full of vitality and responsibility:

- It is directed towards the highest ideals.

The main principle that can be drawn from this sutta, or indeed from all Buddhist suttas, is that you should make the attainment of a peaceful mind your primary goal. That does not necessarily mean that you have to live a quiet life. It does not mean that you have to give up your job before pursuing that goal. You can be flexible on the outside and completely calm on the inside, that is when you know what inner attitude will help you achieve that goal:

- Strong, straightforward, dedicated. . . .

Straightforward means being honest, and sincere, and not chasing after your interests. It means being truthful, being something that does not lie. It seems like you can always find a reason to say or do something dishonest, telling yourself that it is probably the best way or the way that creates the least disadvantage at that time. But your words must be completely truthful, your outward expression must reflect your inner thoughts and feelings. Your words must come from the heart, not just from the rational part. Because if you let your heart speak, you have expressed your feelings and the core of truth is always expressed through what you say. Only words spoken from the heart convey truth. Someone else may have a different truth, but when they speak from their heart, and you do the same, the result is what the sutras sometimes call noble speech. It is noble because it helps you understand yourself better. As long as you communicate with each other in mere logical, intellectual, and theoretical terms about your thoughts, hopes, and goals, you have not achieved the inner truth.

That is one aspect of reality. To experience inner peace, you need to aim at the absolute truth, which is always true, not just true in certain circumstances. The absolute truth is universal and all-encompassing and can only be experienced on the spiritual path. To perceive this truth, you must be able to meditate without delusions. Therefore, to have a peaceful mind:

- The senses must be pure and clear

The principle of making the senses pure, in Buddhism there are two types of meditation mentioned here in the most brief way:

- Samatha meditation (purification of the senses) and

- Vipassana meditation (clear understanding).

However, you can also, in general, consider it a clear mind. When meditating, you must put aside all desires during that time. You cannot eat, drink, lie down, or seek other sensory contacts while meditating. You can only do one of two things. If you can calm your senses, you will be able to attain deep meditation. Then you will know what purity means, and for you, there is nothing more important than establishing inner purity. Through the experience of a completely pure mind, you can also realize that the senses contact: Seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, and the mind. In Buddhism, the mind is the sixth sense, which is always dominated by the mind:

- The eyes can only see colors and shapes,

- The ears can only hear sounds, and all these activities take place in the mind.

Depending on the interpretation of the mind, the reaction will follow. Therefore, to purify the senses, the first step in meditation is to stop all thinking. Because every thought brings with it an emotion, then a perception, and then a new thought, there is an endless cycle in which purity and peace cannot exist. But with true mindfulness and meditation, you will no longer run out, chasing after the senses, you will stop feeling after everything that happens in your mind, and you will experience what inner peace is. Once you feel this peace, you will know that there is nothing more important for you to pursue. Once you have practiced meditation, the way to establish peace of mind, you can also maintain a little of this feeling in your daily life. And then you will know what is important, to stop seeking satisfaction in worldly activities.

Normally, most of you think of yourself as intelligent, you think that your understanding is clear and lucid. Unfortunately, that is completely wrong. Your judgments about the world around you are contaminated by the illusion of self, by the belief that you are different from everyone else, that you are a special self. Because of the limitations of these illusions, your intelligence only functions at the worldly level. But if you can cut off these illusions, you can function on a level beyond the ordinary and attain the ultimate truth.

You can only attain a clear understanding when your mind is completely pure, when the currents of thought, and the waves of emotions have calmed down. When you look out at the surface of the stormy sea, you only see waves, and your vision cannot penetrate deeper than that surface. Likewise, when you look inside yourself, you only see rolling illusions, but no peace deep down. But once you have found true purity through practice, you will discover that the entire universe is within you. You are a microcosm within the macrocosm. All you need to know is within you.

As the Buddha said:

- This entire universe, O monks, is within this body and mind.

Clear understanding means to perceive the characteristics of the universe within you:

- Impermanence, unsatisfactoriness.

Only when your mind is completely calm, at ease, and no longer desiring or seeking anything, will these things appear clearly in your mind, that is inner enlightenment. It is called too obvious knowledge, with no need for further explanation, it is the inner seeing.

Greed in everyday life makes it difficult to let go of your desires. Here, greed does not mean wanting everything twice or thrice, buying a new car, or eating a lot, but rather always looking outward to satisfy your mind's desires. On the spiritual level, greed means the desire to exist, the inability to accept the reality of inevitable death, and to take existence as absolutely important. Therefore, once the desire to exist has become less intense, you will realize that you can live more comfortably, and things are not so important because your presence is not so important anymore. But not taking life seriously does not mean ending it. Rather, the wish not to exist is the flip side of the wish to exist. It means you know how impermanent you are. Who knows if you will be alive tomorrow or even home tonight? You plan, you hope, but who knows if you will be alive next year? Let go completely for once, and realize that you are impermanent! There is only this moment, everything else is gone or just a hope. The future does not exist because, when it comes, it becomes the present. The past, like the future, exists only in your mind. The real experience is only in this moment when you are truly present and in that moment you can feel how fleeting it all is. The only thing that matters is to live this moment well:

- With love and generosity, giving, with a gentle heart, and enduring, knowing that you, all of us, are one.

You must realize once and for all that the desire to exist cannot be satisfied. All of you must go through the path of birth, aging, sickness, and death, it is only a matter of time and age is not a determining factor. The only difference is that when you grow old, you no longer make the mistake of youth, believing that you will stay young forever.

The desire to exist drags everything into its cycle:

- The desire to possess, cling to material things, and enjoy sensual pleasures.

The desire to exist, a spiritual manifestation of greed, takes you from one affliction to another, perhaps without you even knowing it. Again, this does not mean that you must die, but that you must know that you are here only for a short time. You need to possess material things to prove that you are who you are and will remain so forever. The more you act like this, the more rigid your views become. And that will create more trouble on the spiritual side: Your views are so deep that it takes a lot of effort to understand the roots of deeper relationships, to be able to let go. As always, the key is to let go.

- Do no evil, no matter how small, that the wise will criticize

This goes back to the first precept: Do not harm. Keeping this precept helps you to have a stable life, a clear conscience, and peace. If you know how to keep the precepts, you will have a basic purity for meditation. As you can see, this sutta covers three areas of Buddhism:

- Moral conduct as a basic support (sila),

- Meditation to discover purity (samādhi), and

- Insight arising from these conditions (wisdom)

In short, as the Buddha taught, if you want to have peace of mind, you should learn to be straightforward, and humble, and know how to use loving speech at the right time. And you should know how to live simply and happily, a life of peace, calmness, few desires, and not follow the crowd.

When you do this, not only will you have peace of mind, but you will also be praised by the wise and loved and respected by those around you.

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