DHARMA IN EVERYDAY LIFE

By Nhat Quan

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The principles of Buddhism always uphold the humanity of human beings and always guide people to develop their wisdom and understanding to behave so that their life is good. So the practice of Buddhism is essentially the cultivation of wisdom and understanding of your own life.

Buddhism approaches life in many different ways. But no matter how different it is, it doesn't pay much attention to bigotry and helps people practice renunciation, that's the style of people who know how to practice.

In everyday life, you need inspiration. In Buddhism, too, the inspiration or motivation for practicing the monastic style or renunciation is bodhicitta. The core of Mahayana Buddhism is compassion and wanting to help others. So whether you are a businessman, a doctor, or a monk, you need to have a kind heart. You benefit the world by doing your job well:

- Monks spread morality for people to follow

- Doctors specialize in healing,

- Farmers grow rice,

- Teachers specialize in teaching...

Whatever job you do, it is important to have a good style and behave with a good and pure motive, as long as all your actions are directed towards the benefit not only for yourself but for many people. others, not harming anyone is okay. However, because your mind is still stubborn and clingy, you are busy pursuing external goals such as:

- Own houses, cars, money, fame.

Even if you have a seemingly perfect life on the outside, you still feel like something is missing. Because you have focused on dominating and choosing the wrong target. So the style of the monastic is considered complete, who not only prays for outer material wealth, but you also need to direct your mind towards inner spiritual wealth. According to the Venerable One's guide, there are six means by which you can achieve inner wealth:

1- Control anger

The mind and state of anger, when you are still an ordinary person, it is impossible not to have anger. Knowing that, so first, you need to learn how to control anger. Because when anger and anger arise, it will bring many bad consequences, making you unable to have peace in life.

2- Practice not being stingy, avaricious

Second, you need to get rid of the stingy, avaricious mind and at the same time help the mind to become generous by the practice of giving, through which you first practice giving of the superfluous. To accomplish this first turning point, you must always keep in mind:

- All accumulated wealth and property, until your death, you can't take it with you, so you have to leave it to someone else.

Understanding this to overcome the mind of mediocrity is wisdom.

3- Practice looking forward and looking back

You must look forward to following the example of those who have achieved, and to feeling grateful and appreciative of what has been achieved and is. But don't compare your success with others, because doing so will always make you feel inferior. Therefore, the venerable ones often advise, you should look behind, and look back at the life journey you have gone through, to have more energy to continue moving forward.

Because if you only know how to look up, you will get bored easily, and you will never know when you will be like someone. Of course, sometimes you need to look up, but you need to know how to appreciate and be grateful for what you have, you have achieved, because it is a source of encouragement for you to go further.

4- There is no envious mind

When you compare yourself to others, it's easy to lose confidence. Jealousy is extremely subtle, difficult to recognize, but it is always present in life. For example, when you see other people succeed, even though you don't necessarily want to hinder them, you actually find it difficult in your heart to be happy with their success. Or you may feel sorry for yourself. All of this comes from jealousy, envy sometimes in its gross form, sometimes in its subtle form. So you should not be jealous, but be happy.

5- There is no pride

The reason for having pride is because you always want to take credit for yourself, when you do something, you often think you are good, but when it comes to difficulties and failures, blame the situation.

Conceit often makes you blind, not considering where success comes from and where. Of course, you can succeed by your own efforts, but besides that, there is always the help of many other people. Sometimes you don't realize this, pride makes you forget everything. This makes you abuse your power or feel vulnerable or insecure. Sometimes, the label of success is too great, beyond capacity, especially when relationships are mainly based on power and money, without a truly sustainable nature. When you lose fame and money, you become empty-handed.

6- Recognize your true self

You should not identify yourself with success or failure. This makes many people, when they are at the peak of success, conceited, and triumphant. But, suddenly experience failure, become desperate, and even commit suicide. The reason is that their ego is too big, too attached to success or power.

In life, everyone wants to make a name, everyone succeeds but no one wants to fail, and everyone wants to last a long time on this earth. Therefore, the health sector and agencies involved in taking care of your life are conscious and have a plan to make your health more and more advanced, and life expectancy is enhanced.

That's everyone's wish and yours too. But remember that when you judge someone's style, you should not base it on his life expectancy, not on the amount of time he lived, but mainly on the reality of how he lived.

Any person's life is only lived once and it passes very quickly even for the longest-living person. Therefore, how to live in a good style is really useful to life and society. There are people who don't live long but leave behind a lot of precious values; Their names are preserved for generations to come. Those are the people:

- Better to have a glorious minute and then suddenly stop

Still more than glimmering for a thousand years.

But there are also many people who live a very long time, but the days of a truly meaningful life are few. It is clear that lifestyle and quality of life are really important and are the basis for evaluating a person's life.

Therefore, you must know, if you lose money, you can make money back, if you lose a car, you can buy a car again, but if you lose time, you can never get it back. Wasting time is losing everything. Time is a straight stream, never stopping and never turning back. Every opportunity, if missed, is lost.

Youth without a good lifestyle, unable to do anything for life for themselves, still rushes to old age. Time is a steady stream, cold, never waiting for the delay. As a person who knows how to practice, you should cherish your time, especially in this advanced age, the intellectual economy has made time priceless. Boeing makes one plane every day. The jet plane flies at 300,000km a second faster than the speed of light… So all your clunky expressions, and slow, and turtle-like practices seem out of place in the current global trend now.

A person who does not have a decent lifestyle, letting time pass in vain is guilty to himself, to life, to fellow human beings. Therefore, you must have a good listening ear to find the right, good, and useful things to note, study and follow.

Practice being a good person, you have to know what to say. Say the right things at the right time, in the right place, in the right way, in accordance with morality, human conscience, and the trend of the times. You must know how to act properly, help protect the truth, know how to act effectively in the assigned work, the profession you are pursuing to help the development of the community and humanity.

In fact, the number of people listening to too many things is wrong, useless, talkative, irresponsible, and act contrary to conscience and the law too much. Obviously, they need to be actively guided.

In this world, it is not easy for everyone to realize their mistakes or sometimes they do not dare to affirm, do not dare to publicly criticize themselves. There are cases where seeing defects, accepting defects but not correcting them, or not actively and determined to correct them.

Life is also very strange. There are defects that, if removed, are only legitimately beneficial to you, and of course also beneficial to life. However, there are shortcomings that are closely linked to personal selfish interests, so you may personally know that you are wrong or guilty but do not dare to openly correct it, or even deceive yourself to continue committing mistakes.

Thus you can confirm that the person who has really corrected his mistake has truly won over his or her own enemy, a negative force that is always lurking in their hearts and minds. To really correct a defect is to remove the cause of failure, to determine the right motivation for upcoming tasks, for daily actions, and to complete the good form of a person who knows how to cultivate and have practice. That will promise a steady succession of success after success.

Many of you keep trying to resist and destroy the enemy outside, without seeing that the enemy is yourself. Please understand that the enemy here is in a broad sense the cause of bad phenomena. You often spend a lot of time, money, and effort, time, looking for the cause anywhere. Find objective causes, meaningful causes that justify that you didn't cause that defect, that mistake, that sin, that bad external phenomenon. But you don't see in your own mind there are dark corners of greed, envy, hatred, delusion...

That way of thinking, that thought method has deceived you and put you to sleep, making all deviations and mistakes keep sliding, sliding forever without ever stopping.

In short, as a human being in this world, every one of you has a dark corner in your soul, the question is whether that dark corner is wide or narrow, and you can recognize its shape, know how to control it, know how to remove it. To be considered a person who knows how to practice and cultivate, and has the style of a Buddhist, you must note:

- Nothing in life happens that doesn't make sense to you. Even if a bad play, or a boring book, if you know how to watch it, and read it, you can still draw useful things.

In particular, a mistake, even a serious mistake by someone, is more meaningful to those who witness it and understand it. A mistake caused by someone's incomplete preparation is very useful for those who have limited morale and responsibility or subjective thoughts, and general behavior. A mistake of yours due to the application of the wrong technique is also very beneficial for professionals who have not yet mastered the profession. A mistake made by you due to a lack of good coordination among other departments is also very useful in terms of organization for those who play an executive role. Those are lessons learned. Therefore, the idiom of the Orient says:

- One person's mistake is another's lesson very accurate.

Of course, emphasizing this is by no means encouraging you to make mistakes. Because one of your happiness requirements is to make fewer mistakes and achieve more. Those of you who know how to practice, have practice, are in good shape, are a person who knows wrong, know right, and know in time to catch all the changes around to fulfill your responsibilities well.

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