If a person’s body and mind become completely immersed in worldly concerns, over time they will easily grow increasingly anxious, entangled, and lifeless.
A typical example is elderly people whose lives are not going smoothly. They spend their days worrying about livelihood, constantly preoccupied with their children and trivial family matters. Gradually, their bodies hunch over, and they begin to exude a certain “aged aura.”
Young people may not quite understand what this “aged aura” is—try stepping inside a nursing home and you may feel it; the atmosphere there can sometimes be hard to bear. Some say this is simply the natural course of life, that aging is inherently like this. But that is not entirely true. Physical conditions is largely shaped by one’s inner state. In reality, not all elderly people carry such an air. If, in one’s later years, one’s mind becomes more expansive and one’s inner understanding more enriched, one’s whole presence becomes open and at ease. If an elderly person is filled with bodhicitta, when you draw near, you may even smell a subtle fragrance.
Therefore, we must train in taming our own mind, withdrawing from the entanglement of worldly trivialities. If our body and mind remain immersed in such matters, genuine practice cannot even begin. Even if you judge everyone else as ‘bad’ and only yourself as ‘good’, it is like being undercover for eighteen years in the enemy’s territory without ever becoming a qualified spy at all.You are merely trapped there, exhausting yourself meaninglessly. This is something we must truly reflect upon.
Someone may ask: “What should I do if others attack me?” If you feel others are attacking or making your life difficult, just let them be. Why are they attacking you? It must be because you wronged them in past lives—for example, you borrowed something and never repaid it. Now you are simply repaying it with interest. As a practitioner, you should contemplate in this way.
This is not teaching appeasement, nor is it telling you to be like an ostrich—burying your head in the sand while leaving the rest of your body exposed. Rather, it is about changing your perspective: if you can transform what appears to be avoidance into the practice of bodhicitta，then you have cultivated the “ostrich skill”—you become a “bodhicitta ostrich.”
How should this be practiced? It is very simple. When someone attacks or troubles you in daily life, just ignore it—like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. But this “sand” is the “sand of bodhicitta” . Let your entire body and mind be immersed in bodhicitta; then external attacks will be like wind passing over sand dunes, leaving no trace. Just see—what can they really do to you? Practicing in this way is true cultivation.
This article is a preliminary translation draft and has not yet been reviewed or proofread by the speaker.
Comments (0)