DHARMA IN EVERYDAY LIFE

By Nhat Quan

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According to the Psychology Dictionary by researcher J.P. Chaplin:

- Prejudice is a positive or negative attitude formed based on emotional factors, an unsympathetic belief that causes the subject to think or behave similarly towards others.

According to Samuel Johnson, who participated in compiling the English dictionary, he observed that:

- Prejudices often lack a rational basis and are therefore difficult to refute with logical arguments. It can also be said that, in many cases, prejudices are outdated habits insensitive to reality.

The French writer Voltaire said:

- Prejudice is the intelligence of the ignorant. Someone even said that prejudice is the religion of pessimistic sects.

In fact, prejudice also has a positive impact on human society. You generally don't just live for yourself, but also for those around you, for those you love, respect, and cherish. Therefore, you cannot ignore the prevailing beliefs that the vast majority of those around you adhere to. In many cases, inherited prejudices from our ancestors are the very elements that widely unite people, forming the basis for building society. It is no coincidence that the French writer André Gide argued that prejudice is the cornerstone of civilization. Those who are overly opposed to prejudice are, in fact, a form of prejudice themselves. Eliminating old prejudices is merely paving the way for new ones to emerge… Be more open-minded towards those who have nothing to do with your prejudices.

In today's era, prejudice continues to play a prominent role in the psychology of international integration, not only in one country. This often does more harm than good. According to Jack Nachbar and Kevin Lause, authors of the book "Introduction to Popular Culture," prejudice is currently an almost inevitable and inseparable part of this international cultural flow.

Prejudice can be based on many reasons, such as age:

- Young people now only like hip hop.

Or:

- Young people are obsessed with the virtual world, while older people are very clueless about computers.

And about ethnicity:

- Eat Chinese food, live in a Western house, marry a Japanese woman.

There are prejudices based on location:

- Living in a small city is safer than living in a big city.

Or about objects:

- Japanese cars are the most durable in the world...

Regarding health, you might think:

- You will die young if you contract serious illnesses, and if you don't have serious illnesses, you will live long. This is completely wrong, because in reality, more healthy people die every day than those who are sick. Every day, hundreds of thousands of healthy people, without any serious illnesses, die in car accidents, wars, and many other situations. The truth is that serious illnesses are not the only cause of death, because there are so many ways to die!

Or the idea that:

- You won't die young because you don't have a serious illness is wrong.

And it's also wrong to think that if you actually have cancer or AIDS, you will die young just because you have the disease, and if you do not have cancer or AIDS, you will live longer.

The vast majority of prejudices seem neutral and harmless at first glance; however, once these prejudices are expressed, targeting specific individuals belonging to a particular ethnic group, nationality, or society, or to differentiate a particular market, the negative impact multiplies exponentially. And it is based on such interpretations that extremist phenomena arise, such as racism, religious intolerance, or gender antagonism… Furthermore, some prejudices are being exploited in the international marketplace...

According to the classic American journalist Walter Lippmann, the advantages of prejudice in manipulating public opinion lie in the following points:

- Prejudice is always simpler than reality;

- Prejudice is readily available when needed.

- Prejudice is often artificial and superficial, making it easy to please the majority.

- People without prejudice are rarely understood correctly by the majority;

- Prejudice has enduring power.

However, prejudice can also cause equally significant harm. Prejudice can cause people to lose the ability to perceive reality and truth. While life experience helps people establish common rules that have some temporary value, blindly believing in prejudice is always dangerous and can easily lead to unforeseen disasters. The reason is that prejudices are easily exploited by unscrupulous forces in society for malicious purposes, to divide or disrupt your life, or make it difficult to distinguish genuine business partners in international trade. On the one hand, prejudices help you understand reality faster and more easily.

From another perspective, these insights are not always accurate and are often not very relevant to the specific situation you are facing. You make life-or-death decisions based on prejudices rather than on what you hear, see, and your own reasoning, often leading to risky situations where you lose everything.

To understand people correctly, you often have to be lenient towards their prejudices. Not all prejudices have negative effects. Moreover, going too far in eliminating prejudices can lead to the loss of morality and faith.

However, you must be realistic: modern people need to have the right attitude and direction when interpreting proverbs and sayings passed down from ancient times. Therefore, you absolutely cannot blindly believe the arguments left by previous generations, such as:

- The son of an official becomes an official, the son of a poor man burns charcoal all day;

- Husbands and wives of the same age sit and eat comfortably;

- A talented man takes five or seven wives, a virtuous woman only takes one husband;

- One is a wife, the other is a debt.

- The rich are inhumane, the poor are unjust;

There are countless such questionable proverbs and sayings... Each era has its own style, and each family has its own customs.

Even more dangerous is that in some countries, like India today, the custom of valuing sons over daughters still persists. When parents learn that their children are girls, they decide to abandon them. Although the country's laws prohibit abortion and hospitals refuse to perform it, private facilities are always willing to do so, despite their lack of medical equipment and skilled doctors. This has led to many tragic deaths.

When an Indian couple gives birth to a son, the hospital is overflowing with sweets and flowers, but if the baby is a daughter, the situation is completely reversed. The young mother has to fend for herself, sometimes even going hungry for days.

Despite changes in Indian lifestyles, the custom of receiving a dowry remains common. Whether the family is rich or poor, the bride's parents must prepare money and assets as a dowry for their daughter. The amount of the dowry depends on the social status of each family. Sometimes they only need $100, but other times they require gold, silver, expensive jewelry, even houses or cars. Many families despise and mistreat their daughters-in-law simply because they bring few possessions to their husband's home. Therefore, every year in India, approximately 13,000 brides are murdered because they have insufficient dowry. One husband who murdered his wife showed no shame in justifying his crime:

- If the parents cannot pay for their daughter's dowry, then she must pay the price herself.

By reducing prejudice, you can minimize mistakes in choosing the right path, the most harmonious one, leading to peace and happiness. This is not to mention international relations; sometimes, blind prejudice not only fails to improve existing good relationships but also destroys valuable achievements of friendship, leading to unnecessary bloody wars. Every era needs this appropriate way of thinking, not forgetting ancestral traditions, but also not allowing oneself to become so blind as to fail to recognize the positive changes compared to the experiences of one's own nation. Only by acting in this way can the world hope to move closer to a more favorable international order.

Never before has human society experienced so many unusual changes as in modern times. The poet Xuan Dieu once wrote:

- The flying does not wait for the drifting

From me a moment ago to me this moment

To express the endless changes in life and to remind you to be vigilant about the very different manifestations of everyday life. Otherwise, these prejudices will torment you by causing you anxiety and fear. Therefore, you need to break this misconception, especially regarding health and longevity. You must understand that:

- If you don't have cancer or other serious illnesses, many other causes can still lead to death.

Knowing this, you will find peace and tranquility in your mind. And thus, contracting cancer or other serious illnesses will be less frightening and less likely to cause you panic. Once you see that many other conditions can also cause death, you will realize that having cancer or not is not unusual. This will not cause you excessive anxiety.

In the tendency to discard dangerous misconceptions, to live well, besides remaining faithful to tradition, you also need to learn to adapt to new influences; this is the liberating teaching of Buddhism. This means that in daily life, you need to be aware of impermanence and death. Consider death as a natural phenomenon. There is birth, and there is death, just like plants grow and then wither. Trying to ignore this reality of life only generates negative emotions, including depression. Because death is something you will all experience, you need to be aware of it and prepare for it.

You must discard your own concept of permanence, which is deceiving you, and open your heart to accept the idea that whether or not you have a terminal illness, it's all the same, because death can happen to anyone at any time. Whether healthy or not, you can die at any moment. Accepting this will immediately bring peace because freeing yourself from your own concept of permanence allows you to relax and reduce stress. This change in attitude is fundamental to treating illness, as it reduces anxiety and fear. Of course, this is important for everyone, not just those with terminal illnesses.

You must accept that death is a reality, that you can die at any time, and that many conditions other than illness can cause premature death. Especially when your mind is filled with anxiety, fear, or entangled in unfulfilled desires, you need to remember that you could die at any time this month, this week, or even today.

Because selfishness and attachment to this life give rise to many desires for pleasure, wealth, power, and fame, and then you suffer anxiety and fear when these desires are not satisfied. Remembering that you could die today, even in the next hour, will help you immediately eliminate all delusional thoughts and desires. Remembering death helps you see clearly that all desires and cravings are meaningless. As soon as you remember impermanence and death, you immediately find peace, happiness, and serenity, because you have eliminated all unnecessary desires that only bring instability.

You need to be aware of the true nature of your life, your body, your family and friends, and your possessions. All are merely conditioned phenomena, meaning they are temporary and impermanent. You need to be aware of their true nature and not be deceived by the concept of permanence, mistakenly seeing them as permanent and desiring them to be permanent. Then you cling to these temporary things and become resentful at the thought of death, of having to leave them. This simply means you are frustrated with the natural state of things, and the refusal to accept the nature of things makes your death even more horrific.

Death itself isn't the problem; your concept of death is. Death isn't inherently frightening, but your mindset makes it frightening and unacceptable. Your mind clings to the external phenomena of life: your body, your family, your friends, your possessions. But this is like clinging to what appears in a dream, because your mind is based on an illusory concept. You see these things as real and independent, possessing inherent nature, even though all of them are merely names assigned by the mind. You don't realize that they depend on their constituent elements, on causes and conditions, or on the mind itself, on the concept of names and entities. All these things appear before you as if they have an inherent nature, and you believe this false presentation as real.

Based on this illusory concept, you exaggerate the positive qualities of your body, your family, your friends, and your possessions, and then cling to your fantasies. For example, you become infatuated with a beautiful object, as if its beauty were inherent, objective, and unrelated to your mind; and this attachment prevents you from accepting the reality of life, accepting impermanence and death. This attachment to life prevents you from accepting death; instead, it makes death seem terrifying and even unthinkable.

However, death itself does not truly exist; death itself is not terrifying. Death is a creation of your own mind. Therefore, your mind can also make death enjoyable. You can use your mind to transform death into a happy, exhilarating experience. Because you already possess the ability to transform death from a terrifying event into an exciting one, you can use your own death to develop your consciousness, so that the experience of death becomes beneficial to yourself and to all sentient beings.

An essential and practical transformative practice will help you understand how your concepts have created your problems, including the fear of death, and I will return to discuss this in more detail. You are all fundamentally the same. When your stomach is empty, you feel hungry and want to eat. But at the moment you are not hungry, someone else may be, and at another time, you may feel hungry while someone else is not. Illness is the same; you may have had a recent general health checkup and believe you are not sick, but it is actually only a matter of time. That certainly doesn't mean you haven't experienced the illnesses that others are experiencing now, nor does it mean you will never experience them in the future. In countless past lives, you have experienced countless illnesses and other ailments on this earth. No illness or ailment is new. There are times you overcome illness and times you don't. However, when you leave this physical body, you also leave the illness. Your consciousness continues, but because the mind doesn't carry the illness of the physical body, you are not reborn with that illness.

Although from a Western perspective some illnesses might be considered newly arising, from a Buddhist perspective, they are nothing new. According to the Buddhist explanation of consciousness and the entire experience of reincarnation, each of you has experienced these things countless times. That's perfectly natural, like a seedling sprouting from a seed. The point to understand is that if you don't do something now to perfect your consciousness, you will continue to experience these things countless times again.

You should feel happy that you have been able to live this long and especially joyful for having the opportunity to develop your consciousness and transform all painful experiences into happiness. Even if you suffer from what is called illness, you still have an immense opportunity to make spiritual progress, develop wisdom, compassion, and other virtuous qualities. You have the opportunity to use your illness to move from one happiness to another, until you reach the ultimate happiness of perfect enlightenment, which is to be forever free from all problems and their causes.

Your mind can lead you to the end of the cycle of birth and death, the end of all suffering. In this present moment, as you develop your consciousness toward that goal, you need to make your illness and all your other experiences valuable, not only for yourself but also for all other suffering beings. You should use your illness to liberate all other beings from suffering, bringing them temporary happiness and especially ultimate happiness.

Because you have such a precious opportunity to develop your consciousness and bring happiness to other beings, it is extremely important not to waste the remaining years, days, or even minutes of your life. Your attitude will determine whether your life is meaningful or meaningless. If your attitude is unhealthy, you waste time and live a meaningless life. If your attitude is healthy, if your wish is to bring peace and happiness to other sentient beings, you will make your life most meaningful.

In short, prejudice is a positive or negative attitude formed based on emotional factors, an unsympathetic belief that causes the subject to think or behave similarly towards others. But prejudices are not insurmountable, so you should be realistic. Modern people need to have the right attitude and direction when interpreting proverbs and sayings passed down from ancient times. You absolutely cannot blindly believe the arguments left by previous generations, such as:

- The son of an official becomes an official, the son of a poor man burns charcoal all day long;

- Husband and wife of the same age sit around and eat;

- A talented man takes five or seven wives, a virtuous woman only takes one husband;

- One is a wife, the other is a debt.

- The rich are heartless, the poor are unjust.

But in reality, this still happens:

- The children of officials do not become officials, while the children of poor families can still become officials and be talented individuals for the country.

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