DHARMA IN EVERYDAY LIFE

By Nhat Quan

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Trees sprout green buds and flowers give you fragrant, beautiful blooms thanks to fertilizers, and secondary conditions such as sunlight, fresh water, and a skilled gardener. Likewise, for people to be peaceful, healthy, and happy, they must also rely on loving materials, the living environment, and loved ones around them to live in love and affection. The same goes for other living beings.

The material I want to talk about here is the material of love in human love and the object is human. Indeed, everyone in life wants to have love and happiness. Whether it's an old man, an old woman, or a child. Old men and women who have a lot of love will live longer. Children who receive a lot of loving material will grow up quickly. It means that from the time you first come out of your mother's womb until your old age and death, everyone needs the material of love and dreams of living a happy life and no one likes to experience suffering. To understand the problem clearly, you must first realize that there are two types of happiness and suffering:

- Body and spirit.

In both of these types, your mind is still in control and has a lot of influence on you. Unless your body is sick or extremely deprived, your physical life still plays a secondary role in your daily activities. When your body is healthy and your material life is relatively complete, you feel somewhat happy. However, if your spirit is in crisis, lack of hunger, whether small or large, small or big, you immediately feel very miserable. And when you cannot control your spirit, it can lead you to destroy your life unjustly. Therefore, I think finding clarity, peace, and love in the soul is extremely important.

If you want peace of mind and body, you need to develop love and compassion. The way to develop love is to think about the happiness of others, not to cause suffering to anyone. When you know how to give love and help others, you help yourself achieve true happiness. Practicing the virtues of tolerance, forgiveness, and extending love to everyone, your soul will immediately feel pure and peaceful. To have this kind of mind you need to practice a lot, and it takes a long time. Practice by directing your mind towards the object. Because when you direct your mind to a certain object, you are paying attention to that object. Such as:

- When you plant a tree, you must pay attention to that tree, take care of it, fertilize it, water it... so that it can grow well. That's called caring for plants.

In a more precise and beautiful sense, that care means you are sending your love to the object. When you take care of a tree, you put all your heart and all your love into that tree. That is the reason why the US Department of Social Affairs when the elderly need to take care of them, chooses the person to take care of them, whether it is their children or the closest person because they think their children will be the ones who have a lot of love for them with their parents. Unless they don't have children, they choose outsiders to do it.

Similarly, when a mother loves a child, she puts all her heart into taking care of her child. Because no one loves you as much as your mother loves you. Even as soon as it is born, the child is in great need of the mother's love. Babies rely on their mother's milk in the beginning to grow. Even though formula milk is available today to feed babies, breast milk is still the basic natural source of life for babies. The child sucking on the mother's breast as a newborn shows the love for the child is as pure as water flowing from a source. If the mother does not truly love her child or gets angry when the child cries or plays, the flow of breast milk will be clogged and will not flow normally. Again, the baby's body and especially the brain from birth until three or four years old, the mother's careful care is extremely important to help the child's body be healthy. grown and fully developed. Without the care, love, and nurturing of the mother, the baby's body may grow slowly, especially its brain cannot develop normally. The reason is that it is very difficult for a child to grow up without adult care, so a mother's love is the most important nurturing material. The health and happiness of children completely depend on the loving nurturing and dedicated teaching of mothers.

When children grow up, their parents send them to school. At that time, the child needs education and guidance from teachers. In addition to teaching general knowledge, if teachers know how to train students to have good qualities such as integrity, self-confidence, and helping the needy, etc., then these students will be grateful, and respectful and keep a lasting good impression in their hearts about that teacher.

On the contrary, if teachers do not show their wholehearted love and care for their students, the love and affection between them and the teacher will quickly fade. So when a teacher cares about a student, he or she must know how to take care of that student, bring all the teacher's knowledge to impart, and bring all the values ​​of personality and morality to teach. In other words, that teacher must put their love into that student. That means when you value and love someone, you want to express your feelings in one way or another, even a greeting is care, it's putting your love into the other person.

Similarly, if a patient in a hospital receives wholehearted care and dedicated treatment from a doctor, the doctor's love will be the most effective medicine to help the patient heal quickly, even though He's not a good doctor. On the contrary, even if a doctor is talented, he lacks ethics, love, and dedication when treating patients, making the sick person sad and angry, so they cannot recover quickly. Therefore, the doctor's love and dedication to treating patients will greatly contribute to helping sick people heal quickly.

An ideal family is a family where husband and wife are faithful and love each other, parents are responsible for their children, and children know how to respect their parents and ancestors. Even if people live in wealthy circumstances, without love, they will suffer. Love is the element and material of happiness, helping people live responsibly and becoming a personal, family, and social morality. People with love and responsibility will accept any situation to give up personal enjoyment. Taking the time you can to care for others in need is essential.

It's the same with an organization, if they care for each other, if they love each other, then only will good things come to each other. A person who treats you well means that the other person is giving you precious love. But usually, you only show love and closeness to people you know, such as:

- Son loves his father and mother. Wives love their husbands, or friends love each other and visit each other, but they cannot love others.

But with the spirit of compassion taught by the Buddha, you not only love your relatives and acquaintances, but you must spread your love to all living beings. That means the people you know you love already, and even the people you don't know or have never met if the other person is suffering or the other person is in trouble, you also have to extend your love to help them. That is showing the true spirit of compassion. Sometimes the love that you usually treat each other with is conditional:

- I love you because you love me.

But the spirit of compassion taught by the Buddha is love without discrimination.

When you love someone, you want the other person to be better, more prosperous, and happier. If you look deeper, you will see that when you love people and help them, you are practicing so that your compassion is greater, more tolerant, and more comprehensive. Thanks to your large, tolerant, all-embracing mind, you have a lot of happiness. When your mind is small and narrow, you are someone who always experiences a lot of suffering. Suffering because your mind is not big enough to accept, to contain, not to be able to tolerate good things and bad things. You cannot tolerate the bad things of others, you criticize them, and you cannot tolerate the good things of others because they are created by selfishness, jealousy, and envy. So the more good deeds you do and the more suffering people you help, the more your compassion will spread.

Thanks to this awareness, your soul feels less suffering, and your spirit becomes strong with the determination to overcome all hardships and challenges to achieve a glorious career in life. When you perceive the suffering of others as your own, you will try to practice and develop compassion and love to help all fellow human beings escape all suffering, and thus your soul feels peace and happiness.

Love will bring people a greater source of happiness when you know how to craft the material of love. The reason is simple your nature is to admire love and dislike jealousy and hatred. Humanity, too, needs love to survive. People need help and rely on each other to survive. No matter how talented an individual is, if left alone, they cannot live on their own. In any circumstances or situations:

- Whether rich, wealthy, or poor, when young and healthy, or old and sick, people still have to live thanks to the help of others.

Therefore, the spirit of mutual support is necessary for everyone in society. Not only humans but even animals still have to live in harmony. All external objects, from the speck of dust to the huge earth where you live; From rivers and seas to mountains, forests, and fields. From the clouds in the sky to the flowers in the garden, there is a correlation and affinity with each other.

Without mutuality and cause-and-effect connection, all things would not be able to arise or exist. Because humans need to rely on the help of others to survive, love is an essential ingredient for your life. And you are responsible for your actions that create happiness or cause suffering for everyone else.

In daily social life, people like to listen to gentle and gentle words even if the speaker's story is not good. On the contrary, no matter how attractive a topic is, if the speaker uses harsh language and lacks politeness, no one wants to listen. Therefore, in everything in life, from small to large, love and respect for others is the basic thing that creates happiness for everyone. So, whether you are aware of it or not, at the moment you are born, love is still as necessary as blood to nourish your life. Even if that love comes from an animal, or your enemy, children and adults still need it.

Love has brought you many mental and physical benefits. What is clear to everyone is that when your mind is happy, your body will be healthy. Anger and sadness can easily make you sick. On the contrary, a pure and peaceful mind helps you avoid many diseases. To have true happiness, you need to love everyone, and not harbor jealousy or resentment towards anyone. You should realize that love is a good and noble virtue and practice and develop it in everyday life.

All of you, whether good or bad, rich or poor, are all the same people. Everyone wants to live in happiness and does not like suffering. You have the right to overcome and fight suffering to gain happiness. When you understand that everyone is equal in their desire to find and have the right to achieve happiness, you will naturally feel sympathetic and close to them. When your heart has universal love for humanity, you will feel the responsibility to help the needy overcome their difficulties.

You do this work of relieving suffering with an equanimous mind, without choosing or distinguishing between close friends and strangers, enemies or friends, noble or lowly. When you know that as humans, they have the same joys and sufferings as you, so you cannot have discrimination or division between one person and another, but you need to have compassion and mercy to save all.

To be successful in developing the substance of love, you need to undergo a long period of patient practice. When you still think about your petty self, your ego that is greedy and selfish, passionate about worldly pleasures, and you do not dare to sacrifice your interests for the happiness of others, it is very difficult for you to practice this great love. Even though it's not easy to do right away, that doesn't mean you can't do it. If you want, you can start practicing slowly and you will get the results you want.

First of all, you need to eliminate the great obstacles to the development of compassion, which are resentment and anger. These are the two most harmful evils that often reside in your mind, but you can control them. To control anger, you not only need compassion but also wisdom and patience. Patience is a very difficult thing to do, requiring a strong will from you. Without patience, you will live in a state of anxiety and unhappiness. Therefore, when anger arises, it is a sign of weakness. Therefore, when encountering discord or conflict with someone, you should try to control your anger, be very calm, and solve the problem with compassion to avoid a breakdown. Even if someone has an evil mind and wants to harm, they will not succeed, but as a result, they will only bring on their failure. Therefore, if you want to eliminate selfishness and jealousy, you need to practice compassion to help others avoid suffering as a result of their anger. Therefore, by practicing patience, you can avoid anxiety and affliction; and have peace and happiness.

If you only think about compassion, it is not enough, you need to hope to encounter favorable circumstances to realize and develop that great love. And the people who will help you create that opportunity are your enemies, they are the ones who have caused the most difficulties for you. Therefore, if you want to learn and practice compassion, you should consider them as your friends or teachers. Although no one wants to have many enemies, if there are no enemies, patience and spreading great love to all living beings will not be sustainable. Therefore, you need enemies, and thank them because they help you keep your mind pure and peaceful.

Of course, everyone wants to have many friends. And I often joke that if you are selfish and want to benefit yourself, you should be altruistic. You should love others, serve, and help them. You need to socialize, laugh, and make friends with people. Well, when you have difficulty, you will have someone to help. On the contrary, if you never think about the happiness of others, in the long run, you will suffer losses. Arguments, anger, strife, and jealousy can never bring about friendship between people. But only tolerance, forgiveness, and joy can help you make friends, be close, and love each other. So you must know the art of living how to have more friends and fewer enemies and how to keep a smile on your lips when interacting with people, especially the joyful smile of love. In daily communication, you encounter many different smiles from people:

- Having a bitter, fake, or dismissive smile.

- Sometimes smiles express dissatisfaction, causing suspicion or fear in others.

However, there are also smiles that bring joy of peace and liberation:

- The compassionate, joyful, and equanimous smiles of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.

These are the smiles that you should try to make to bring happiness to everyone.

 

You need to share love with everyone, anyone you meet, no matter what the situation, you will concerned as your parents and siblings. You don't care whether their faces are new or old, strange or familiar. No matter what clothes they wear, beautiful or ugly, cheap or expensive, and no matter their temperament, gentle or fierce, you still see no difference between them and you. That's why the Buddha taught:

- Everyone has a Buddha nature, or the same ability to become Buddha.

I believe that everyone living in society, whether at the family, tribal, national, or international level, is key or secret to bringing people to the world to have a good, peaceful, and happy life. Currently, it is the application, practice, and development of the material of love. The basic thing is that you should cultivate and practice the good qualities in each of you. I usually try to treat anyone I meet for the first time like an old friend. This has brought me a boundless source of happiness. That is the practice of the Buddha's virtues of compassion and joy.

In short, love is the living substance of humans, and in general of all sentient beings. Without nurturing love, it is difficult for you to live well. Therefore love is very important, very necessary for everyone's life in this life. On the path of practice, you contemplate the Dharma of Emptiness, become mindless, to return to a pure, pure mind called white pure consciousness. From that pure being, you can develop a mind of great compassion, which is the ultimate pure love, loving all living things equally. Through filtering out defilements, your mind becomes pure and clear. Thanks to purity, your mind can communicate with the holy minds of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, so your love is also promoted in their noble direction, completely pure, selfless, and altruistic. So your work can accompany the practice of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, only to serve sentient beings with all pure love, without prejudice, without contamination, just wanting to help everyone without making any demands on yourself.

Time is as fleeting as an arrow, this life is so short, don't waste it with unkind looks, with an unloving attitude, with unloving words. Having the opportunity to meet each other in a temple, a school, a company, or some other opportunity to get to know each other... that acquaintance is very precious, very good. So don't look at each other's bad sides to criticize each other, hurt each other, or cause each other suffering. Don't waste too much time on things that make you sad and make others miserable. It is of no use. Let's give each other lotus buds filled with respect, friendly looks, and joyful smiles. This is a necessary material that you can donate to anyone in this life.

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