é™æ€è¯ Readings For Silent Reflection
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The Blessed Buddha once said:
Where, Friends, is the ability of enthusiastic energy to be seen and found?
The Energy ability is to be found among the Four Right Efforts.
What is Right Effort?
The effort to overcome already present disadvantageous mental states.
The effort to prevent future disadvantageous mental states from arising.
The effort to develop yet unarisen advantageous mental states.
The effort to maintain already arisen advantageous mental states.
That is Right Effort!
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Everything arises and passes away. When you see this, you are above sorrow. This is the shining way.
Taking impermanence truly to heart is to be slowly freed from the idea of grasping, from our flawed and destructive view of permanence, from the false passion for security on which we have built everything. Slowly it dawns on us that all the heartache we have been through from grasping at the ungraspable was, in the deepest sense, unnecessary.
At the beginning this too may be painful to accept, because it seems so unfamiliar. But as we reflect, slowly our hearts and minds go through a gradual transformation. Letting go begins to feel more natural, and becomes easier and easier.
It may take a long time for the extent of our foolishness to sink in, but the more we reflect, the more we develop the view of letting go. It is then that a complete shift takes place in our way of looking at everything. -
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Further, if a person who is about to be harmed calls out the name of Guan Shi Yin Bodhisattva, the knives and staves of the attackers will break into pieces and he will be saved.
---Lotus Sutra Chapter 25 (Universal Door of Guan Yin Bodhisattva)
�無觀世音�薩 _()_
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Monetary wealth is never truly yours. At the end of the day, it is your health and blessings that are truly yours.
---Venerable Master Hsing Yun -
"These four, O Monks, are distortions of perception, distortions of thought distortions of view...
Sensing no change in the changing,
Sensing pleasure in suffering,
Assuming "self" where there's no self,
Sensing the un-lovely as lovely
- Siddhartha Gautama Buddha
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We cannot hope to die peacefully if our lives have been full of violence, or if our minds have mostly been agitated by emotions like anger, attachment, or fear. So if we wish to die well, we must learn how to live well: Hoping for a peaceful death, we must cultivate peace in our mind, and in our way of life. -
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"Impermanent, subject to change, are compound things. Strive on with heedfulness!" This was the final admonition of the Buddha Gotama to his disciples.
And when the Buddha had passed away, Sakka, the chief of the deities, uttered the following:
"Impermanent are all compound things,
They arise and cease, that is their nature:
They come into being and pass away,
Release from them is bliss supreme".
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