DHARMA IN EVERYDAY LIFE

By Nhat Quan

---o0o---

The Buddha taught that if His Dharma is placed in a person lacking spirit and vitality, it will be like a pair of discarded sandals. On the contrary, if that teaching is placed in the heart of a noble person with a positive and progressive spirit, it will become pure and never fade or become dark.

As a Buddhist, you have seen such value, but if you only know how to spend all your time studying the Buddha Dharma in theory, then the Buddha Dharma will not bring any benefit. Only when you know how to train your heart, helping it eliminate all its negative and corrupt spirits, will you fully inherit the benefits that practicing the Dharma can bring you. Only then will the true Dharma be preserved in purity, and the original principles will not be distorted or deviated.

During the years of preaching, the Buddha's last sermon before his death advised his disciples as follows:

- After my death, the Dharma will replace me as your teacher.

Knowing how to follow the Dharma is the way you show your loyalty to me. During the last forty-nine years of my life, I did not hide anything in my teachings. There was not a single secret teaching, not a single hidden meaning. All my teachings were given honestly and transparently.

You can immediately see the Buddha's teachings in each person through their behavior in the family and society, for example, as people often say:

- Fullness loss of appetite, sadness and anger loss of wisdom

Indeed, sadness or anger has a great influence on relationships, work, and communication in life. Therefore, to avoid unfortunate consequences caused by a moment of impulsiveness, you should know how to control yourself and not let negative feelings change your mentality. Therefore, there is a folk saying:

- Sadness and anger make you lose your mind.

I would like to tell you a true story. It happened that night many years ago. After reciting the sutras, Venerable Hue Nhut usually returned to his meditation room. But that day, when he returned to his meditation room, he suddenly had a certain motivation that urged him to go back to the Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva shrine to burn incense. When he arrived at the Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva shrine, he saw a horrifying event happening, which was:

- The image of a woman lying motionless next to the Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva shrine.

Seeing that something was wrong, Venerable Hue Nhut informed me, and I immediately called 911, an ambulance came and took her to the hospital. After the ambulance took the woman to the emergency room, I told Venerable Hue Nhut that the Dharma Protectors, Good Spirits, and the eight groups of demons at Duoc Su Temple were very powerful, because if Venerable Hue Nhut had not urged her to go to the Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva shrine, two things could have happened:

1- That woman would have died for sure

2- That woman would have died, but our Duoc Su Temple would not have been at peace. Because if someone died in the temple, of course, the government's investigation agency would have come, and then the press, rumors, and bad reputation would have spread.

Then, a week later, a young woman came to the temple and claimed that she was the one who had been called by the temple for an ambulance to take her to the hospital. At that time, I asked her why she was lying motionless next to the Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva shrine. At that time, she explained the situation:

- Because she was angry with her husband, she drank pesticide and committed suicide.

Hearing that, I asked:

- Why didn't you commit suicide somewhere else but instead commit suicide at the temple?

The young woman replied:

- I chose to commit suicide at the temple because I thought that after I died at the temple, the Bodhisattva would take me to the Buddha's land.

Hearing that, I said:

- You think that way is wrong. If you want to be welcomed by Bodhisattvas or Buddhas to the Buddha's land, you must know how to cultivate your mind and character. If you die in sadness, suffering, and anger like that, you will only create more karma in the cycle of reincarnation. Moreover, if you die in a temple, you will unintentionally bring trouble to the temple, and your karma will be even heavier. Therefore, you should not have such negative thoughts anymore. If you want to be welcomed by Bodhisattvas or Buddhas to the Buddha's land, you must regularly practice good karma and create more blessings. But remember, when you are sad or angry, you should not do thoughtless things.

Hearing that, the woman said:

- Thank you, Master, I will not do foolish things anymore

Therefore, to avoid unfortunate situations that may occur, according to the Buddha's teachings, when you are sad or angry, you must first:

1- Keep your mind calm.

The first thing you should do when you are sad or angry is to tell yourself:

- I have to be calm.

Because emotions at this time often go along with actions that you may regret later, typically like the woman I just told you about. Fortunately for that woman, after being taken to the emergency room, the doctor promptly cleaned her stomach so she was able to keep her life, and there was no impact on her health. But if the medicine had absorbed too much, she could not save her life, or after saving her life, she was disabled. So, her husband was bored and left her, now she is disabled, unable to die, but living with disabilities, then life is truly tragic.

That is the consequence of sadness, anger, and wrong decisions. Because often when you are angry, you cannot think properly and thoroughly. You can say or do things you think are right just to vent your anger, or because it feels appropriate at that moment. So the advice now is, instead of following your emotions, you should take a deep breath and take some time to calm yourself down to avoid regrets later. Therefore, when you are angry, you:

- Don't say or do anything.

2- Keep yourself busy.

Usually, when you are sad or angry, your mind becomes dark. So another thing to do when you are sad or angry is to distract your mind. You take yourself away from the problem you are facing, by making yourself busy. Because when you are sad or angry, you tend to think that you have to face it immediately, and at the same time prove to everyone that you are not weak. But acting out of anger is the greatest weakness of humans. Instead of making a mess of things, instead of drinking to drown your sorrows, instead of hating life, hating people. Instead of gambling and having fun, it is better to focus on useful things to keep your mind busy. Things you can do at this time are:

- Go out with a good friend

- Recite Buddha's name, chant sutras, meditate, listen to the Dharma, etc.

3- Think before you speak.

When you are sad or angry, you often say things that you should not say. Especially when you are sad or angry, you tend to only say words that hurt others, without even knowing the meaning of what you are saying. Therefore, you will create disagreements between you and others, while normally you would not act like that. Therefore, try to think carefully before you intend to say anything while sad or angry. From the perspective of Buddhists, the Venerables often advise that you should use the Right View to see things. Use the Right Thought to think and use the Right Speech to speak. This way, you will not hurt others and will not make you regret it later. In addition, psychologists often advise you to take a walk at this time to avoid saying things that hurt others.

4- Find a solution.

When you are angry, you should not keep the reasons for your sadness and anger in your heart, but find a way to release it as soon as possible. That means one of the things you should not do when you are angry is to find a way to resolve it as soon as possible. Because the cause of sadness or anger can be an unexpected problem or a problem that has been suppressed for a long time without being resolved. One of the things you should do at such a time is to find a solution to the problem and find a way to deal with the causes of it rather than fighting and cursing. Because usually, talking to relieve anger often does not bring good results. Instead of cursing and yelling, the solution can be:

- Sympathy and forgiveness.

5- Don't curse.

Never curse when you are angry. You often say very silly things when you are angry just to hurt the other person. But in fact, you do not do anything when you hurt others. On the contrary, cursing only creates more karma in your mouth and mind, which does not benefit your life. So whenever you feel like you are insulting someone when you are angry, take a step back and consider:

- It is better to be happy

6- Don't hold grudges in your heart.

You can be angry with people who are not nice, or rude to you, but that does not mean you have to hold grudges against them. Holding grudges against others will only make you think about the wrong things that they have done, thereby making you feel worse and worse. Instead, you should be forgiving and tolerant to forget the mistakes of others. This will help you live a life without the shadow of negative emotions.

7- Simplify the problem.

One way to resolve a sad, angry situation is to use humor. Whatever the cause of the suffering, try to create humor. Reducing the problem will help you avoid unnecessary stress in life. Therefore, instead of being disappointed and responding angrily, simplify the problem by thinking of a joke, or making the atmosphere more cheerful. But be careful, do not use humor to be sarcastic, or to dig because you will lose the purpose and make the situation worse.

Remember that the consequences of anger and sadness are very scary. That emotion can be the pride of a person with a strong personality, but those who cannot control their anger will become difficult to approach, they will even isolate themselves from the community.

This advice shows that the Buddha not only guided his disciples in his lifetime but also had a beneficial impact on humanity and society for thousands of years to come. The Buddha's teachings were truly unique. To be transmitted to humanity, the long period of nearly six thousand years after the Buddha's death was very difficult, so the preservation of the Buddha's orthodox teachings relied solely on the memory of the great monks. All phenomena are constantly changing, and the Buddha's teachings, that is, the Dharma he gave, are also just a phenomenon. People, culture, society, language, and civilization all change. Although the Dharma is also just a phenomenon and has been expressed from many different perspectives, the core of the Buddha's teachings is still preserved. His teachings were not divided into five or seven parts to become other religions, nor was there a prophet who represented him to impose his views. The Buddha's decision above is extremely wise, skillful, and far-sighted. The ultimate goal in Buddhist practice is Wisdom, which helps you practice to see reality as the Buddha saw it when he attained Enlightenment.

That path is the way of keeping precepts and meditating through the six right things, that is, the Six Paramitas. This practice helps you to master your body, speech, and thinking to develop Wisdom to help you attain the ultimate fruition that the Buddha attained when meditating under the Bodhi tree. Keeping precepts and meditating will help you gradually eliminate all attachments and desires to realize the state of Liberation of an Arhat, that is, a state of absolute cessation, no more formation, destruction, and rebirth. In other words, this existence is your final existence in the phenomenal world. Mahayana Buddhism was formed six centuries after the ancient schools, that is, starting from the first century AD, and advocated an open path of practice, upholding the ideals of Wisdom and Compassion of the Bodhisattva. Compassion and Wisdom always go together, and cannot be separated from each other, similar to the two wings of a bird:

- Because without Wisdom there will be no Compassion, and without Compassion there will never be Wisdom.

Both must always work together to create the Buddhist Path. For Wisdom is simply a cold and hard understanding like a sword. Compassion is simply a way to conceal your crude attachment or weakness based on your lustful ego.

This unique feature of Buddhism is not only a new direction of practice but also opens up a vast and liberal space, leading to deeper expressions and developments of some aspects and concepts of the teachings given by the Blessed One. These efforts have of course also led to appropriate and suitable methods of practice.

In short, the Buddhist reminders are a great advantage in providing a deep understanding of the philosophical, metaphysical, psychological, logical, and even scientific levels of the practical teachings of the Buddha. The most typical and representative examples of these efforts are the thoughts and works of scholars such as Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Dignaga, etc. And on another level, that expansion as well as the Bodhisattva's ideal of Compassion advocated by Mahayana Buddhism has also led to many forms of practice to satisfy people and life through all forms of beliefs with all kinds of colors and rituals, along with the appearance of countless Buddhas, Saints and Bodhisattvas. From a certain perspective, these are skillful means to adapt to different levels and complex temperaments of practitioners.

I think that is also the intention and meaning of the advice of the Venerables. Practically, you must always be aware of where you are on the Path that the Buddha has outlined for you. What skillful means are you practicing to satisfy your instinctive demands or are you looking at the Buddha's footsteps to follow.

---o0o---