Am i wrong to do this?

cheskiz SG

Well, i am more interested in therevada and vajarayana buhddism and abit of protection magic, i am not into those chinese buhddism though i am a 100% blooded chinese.

cheskiz SG

Well, scolding dont always work, people always have this misconception to have an animal to respect you, show him love and care. Well, firstly, they dont belong to the same realm as you and u need to make them fear you before you become the alpha.

cheskiz SG

well, i agree that endurance might not have awareness, what i am trying to say is i can endure but that wont solve anything cause i can take vengance into account for the later part. Endure can sometime means accumulate for the volcano to explode. What i mean is this, it take more than endure and awareness to really resolve aggression and etc.

I dont know how true is it in account to buhddism but this is my person experience, you endure someone's action and when one day u cannot stand the extreme of his, bad things happen.

Well, what are sentient thoughts anyway, but sentient thoughts can be arise from of great wisdom. Laughing

An Eternal Now SG

What exactly do you understand by 'Chinese Buddhism'? (cos most unfortunately, people always related chinese buddhism to some chinese folk traditions and they are completely off)

All traditions are much more similar than they are different. Which means the essential teachings are all the same throughout. And they all teach in Chinese too.. and English. Laughing

And oh.. some people also have some conceptions of Theravada (especially thai buddhism) and Vajrayana as somehow being related to magic and supernatural, which is untrue. Pure/Original Theravada does not allow such practices but it is a Hindu/Brahmanistic culture that has become embedded among Thais and religious circles. The pure dharma practitioners of Theravada in Thailand also do not practice such things, especially the good traditions like the forest traditions in Thailand.

All traditions discourage the practice of supernatural powers over the development of wisdom, and any powers are only side effects of one's true spiritual cultivation's development of precepts, samadhi and wisdom.. and any other powers prior to enlightenment and has come by other means should be disregarded.

An Eternal Now SG

Originally posted by cheskiz:
well, i agree that endurance might not have awareness, what i am trying to say is i can endure but that wont solve anything cause i can take vengance into account for the later part. Endure can sometime means accumulate for the volcano to explode. What i mean is this, it take more than endure and awareness to really resolve aggression and etc.

When you are aware and liberated, and not just on the level of endurance, you will be able to liberate all those conditionings altogether and not accumulate them. If you payed attention to my previous posts you will see how...

Anyway, from A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle:

REACTIVITY AND GRIEVANCES

Whereas resentment is often the emotion that goes with complaining, it may also be accompanied by a stronger emotion such as anger or some other form of upset. In this way, it becomes more highly charged energetically. Complaining then turns into reactivity, another of the ego's ways of strengthening itself. There are many people who are always waiting for the next thing to react against, to feel annoyed or disturbed about and it never takes long before they find it. This is an outrage, they say. How dare you.. I resent this. They are addicted to upset and anger as others are to a drug. Through reacting against this or that they assert and strengthen their feeling of self.

A longstanding resentment is called a grievance. To carry a grievance is to be in a permanent state of against, and that is why grievances constitute a significant part of many people's ego. Collective grievances can survive for centuries in the psyche of a nation or tribe and fuel a neverending cycle of violence.

A grievance is a strong negative emotion connected to an event in the sometimes distant past that is being kept alive by compulsive thinking, by retelling the story in the head or out loud of what someone did to me or what someone did to us. A grievance will also contaminate other areas of your life. For example, while you think about and feel your grievance, its negative emotional energy can distort your perception of an event that is happening in the present or influence the way in which you speak or behave to ward someone in the present. One strong grievance is enough to contaminate large areas of your life and keep you in the grip of the ego.

It requires honesty to see whether you still harbor grievances, whether there is someone in your life you have not completely forgiven, an enemy. If you do, become aware of the grievance both on the level of thought as well as emotion, that is to say, be aware of the thoughts that keep it alive, and feel the emotion that is the body's response to those thoughts. Don't try to let go of the grievance. Trying to let go, to forgive, does not work. Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place. The seeing is freeing. Jesus' teaching to Forgive your enemies is essentially about the undoing of one of the main egoic structures in the human mind.

The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that. And what is a grievance? The baggage of old thought and emotion.

I dont know how true is it in account to buhddism but this is my person experience, you endure someone's action and when one day u cannot stand the extreme of his, bad things happen.

Therefore I said about transcendental endurance. Not only must you endure, you must liberate your thoughts and rise above endurance altogether. As I also posted above. Be free from needing to endure at all AND also be free from needing to react negatively!

Our Buddha Nature can be likened to total emptiness that is also fullness -- just as vast space encompasses all and rejects none, and attaches to none. Our Buddha Nature is also pure awareness that is ever-present like a shining sun but mostly missed due to the clouds of our ego and sentient thoughts.. it is that which is seeing, hearing, feeling, awaring.

As I posted previously,

Dealing with Anger

I lose my temper easily, how shall I cultivate?

How Shall I Cultivate

You need to cultivate endurance. But, when you have reached the stage where you cannot endure anymore, your temper will still explode. Thus, the need to achieve the endurance of non-endurance. The power of endurance is the greatest in this world. For example, an object may be indestructible when soaked in water or burned with fire, but it can be crushed on impact. However, Sarira or relics can never be crushed. One who cultivates the non-origination of the mind, and the endurance of non-endurance, will upon death produces Sarira. Thus, the capacity of endurance is indeed great!

I get angry over trivial matters, what should I do?

Get angry over trivial matters

Very simple. Just do not be angry. If you are not able to do that, prepare yourself a mirror. Whenever you become angry, have a look at yourself in the mirror. When you see your angry face, you will probably cool down. In this way, you are less likely to be angry again in future.

If the anger is suppressed and though it has been endured the anger still exists, what shall I do when it is beyond endurance?

What to do if the anger is beyond endurance

When it is beyond endurance, the best thing to do is to let it explode. After the explosion, then you will understand that you need to endure.

Well, what are sentient thoughts anyway, but sentient thoughts can be arise from of great wisdom. Laughing

Thoughts that arise of prajna are not sentient thoughts, and sentient thought means unenlightened, unliberated, attached, sentient being's thought.

An Eternal Now SG

COMPLAINING AND RESENTMENT

Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Some egos that perhaps don't have much else to identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the grip of such an ego, complaining, especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don't know what you are doing. Applying negative mental labels to people, either to their face or more commonly when you speak about them to others or even just think about them, is often part of the pattern. Name-calling is the crudest form of such labeling and of the ego's need to be right and triumph over others: "jerk, bastard, bitch"-all definitive pronouncements that you can't argue with. On the next level down on the scale of unconsciousness, you have shouting and screaming, and not much below that, physical violence.

Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling with people and adds even more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You resent other people's greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn't have done. The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the "fault" that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.

Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned. At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without making them into enemies. Your greatest protection, however, is being conscious. Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.

The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only about other people but also about situations. What you can do to a person, you can also do to a situation: make it into an enemy. The implication is always: This should not be happening; I don't want to be here; I don't want to be doing this; I'm being treated unfairly. And the ego's greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.

Complaining is not to be confused with informing someone of a mistake or deficiency so that it can be put to right. And to refrain from complaining doesn't necessarily mean putting up with bad quality or behavior. There is no ego in telling the waiter that your soup is cold and needs to be heated up---if you stick to the facts, which are always neutral. "How dare you serve me cold soup..........." That's complaining. There is a "me" here that loves to feel personally offended by the cold soup and is going to make the most of it, a "me" that enjoys making someone wrong. The complaining we are talking about is in service to the ego, not of change.

See if you can catch, that is to say, notice, the voice in the head, perhaps in the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a conditioned mind-pattern, thought. Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. In fact, you are the awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background, there is the awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. In this way you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind. The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot co-exist.The old mind-pattern or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while because it has the momentum of thousands of years of collective human unconsciousness behind it, but every time it is recognized, it is weakened.

(A New Earth)

An Eternal Now SG

Regarding 'transcendental patience' or 'endurance of non endurance' please read the third post in Cultivating Awareness and a Non-moving mind, written by my dharma teacher in singapore.

Isis SG

Originally posted by An Eternal Now:
[b]COMPLAINING AND RESENTMENT

Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Some egos that perhaps don't have much else to identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the grip of such an ego, complaining, especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don't know what you are doing. Applying negative mental labels to people, either to their face or more commonly when you speak about them to others or even just think about them, is often part of the pattern. Name-calling is the crudest form of such labeling and of the ego's need to be right and triumph over others: "jerk, bastard, bitch"-all definitive pronouncements that you can't argue with. On the next level down on the scale of unconsciousness, you have shouting and screaming, and not much below that, physical violence.

Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling with people and adds even more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You resent other people's greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn't have done. The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the "fault" that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.

Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned. At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without making them into enemies. Your greatest protection, however, is being conscious. Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.

The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only about other people but also about situations. What you can do to a person, you can also do to a situation: make it into an enemy. The implication is always: This should not be happening; I don't want to be here; I don't want to be doing this; I'm being treated unfairly. And the ego's greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.

Complaining is not to be confused with informing someone of a mistake or deficiency so that it can be put to right. And to refrain from complaining doesn't necessarily mean putting up with bad quality or behavior. There is no ego in telling the waiter that your soup is cold and needs to be heated up---if you stick to the facts, which are always neutral. "How dare you serve me cold soup..........." That's complaining. There is a "me" here that loves to feel personally offended by the cold soup and is going to make the most of it, a "me" that enjoys making someone wrong. The complaining we are talking about is in service to the ego, not of change.

See if you can catch, that is to say, notice, the voice in the head, perhaps in the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a conditioned mind-pattern, thought. Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. In fact, you are the awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background, there is the awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. In this way you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind. The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot co-exist.The old mind-pattern or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while because it has the momentum of thousands of years of collective human unconsciousness behind it, but every time it is recognized, it is weakened.

(A New Earth)[/b]

Sometime we get frustrated for things not turning out the way you want it to be and this frustration of wanting is due to our ego. Neutral

Isis SG

Hey about this “magic phrase or situation or person” that can evoke certain emotion (for eg. anger) in ourselves? The habitual of reacting towards is faster than i know anger is coming. It comes at the same instant as the magic phrase appear… so how can i deal with this ?

caleb_chiang SG

Rolling Eyes

An Eternal Now SG

Actually can try Namo Guan Shi Yin Pusa... when your mind resonates with Guan Shi Yin Pu Sa's boundless compassion, anger will naturally subside. While you chant, let your mind be empty and aware...

An Eternal Now SG

Posted this three years ago when the forum just started:

quote:If anyone wants to hurt you and pushes you into a great fire-pit, if you contemplate the power of Avalokitesvara, the fire-pit will change into a pond. - Lotus Sutra

So, this is what the translation says. But my master explained that, the "great-fire-pit" refers to the fires of hatred and anger, while the pond, clear and pure, refers to our Buddhamind. This relates to a true story, or experience, back in Taiwan.

My master had once observed that one of his disciples will meet a tribulation in the coming days... He called him up, and advised him not to be moved away from the triple jems (buddha, dharma, sangha), CHANT Guan-Shir-Yin frequently, and never to be affected by any anger. Just next day, this disciple was working at the construction site (he is a construction worker). Then, he got into an argument with someone on who should use the machine first. Tension rosed, and finally they decided to "settle it" outside. Suddenly, this person remembered my master's words, and began to truly regrett his earlier harshness. He chanted Namo Guanshiryin Pusa, and became very peaceful and calm, and smiled happily. The other person then went there to "settle" the issue, but seeing that he was smiling, he walked away. He threw a vegetable knife he was hiding onto the table. On seeing this, the person (who chanted guanshiryin) was extremely shocked, and realised what could have happened if he had continued the conflict. He was without any weapons, how could he be able to survive, fighting him with a fist?

From this, we should chant, pay reverence, learn, and most importantly, Be Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva. We should learn to be compassionate in all situations, a Bodhisattva's compassion is selfless.

This is the testimonial to the "power of Avalokitesvara", of course, testimonials are really a lot, many people meeting disasters, car accidents, those that one definitely could not have survived, are saved miraculously by the Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva.

Those who suffers from bad temper and strong hatred can try chanting regularly.. perhaps, 108 times a day. Most importantly, when we chant, we must not let our mind wander, and focus on the chanting. In this way, chanting works best to remove our minds of sentient, samsaric thoughts.

We should all learn to be compassionate like Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva.

The ultimate goal of teaching is that Emptiness whose essence is Compassion. - Great Pandita Atisha

Evangelion84 SG

In my ways, I was like the threadstarter too. Embarassed

I have been following this thread, and it have been an enlightening read. Very Happy

I would like to raise 2 questions:

1) Should we give money to the old man, if we believe that he would squander it on cigarettes/beer or believe that he is trying to con us.

2) Taking the lives of living beings is bad. But what about killing mosquitoes? What if, if i dont kill them, they would bite me. Embarassed

Recently, I got angry at someone. Right at that point of time, I realised I was angry. I realised I was coloured by perception because I know I immediately associate the problem with him. It was like me looking at myself from a third person viewpoint.

However, when I talked to him, everything just went out the window. I got angry and blamed him.

Looks like I have to improve on my cultivation of awareness. Crying or Very sad

Let us both jia you in becoming a better person, TS ! Very Happy

An Eternal Now SG

If that is the case and it looks like he does not have problems feeding himself, then perhaps it is not necessary (I feel) to give him money.

That is he has legs and hands, can walk properly, can work. Then there is no need to give.

But continue being mindful of our inner state at all times no matter what reaction they may give.

An Eternal Now SG

Originally posted by Evangelion84:
[b]
2) Taking the lives of living beings is bad. But what about killing mosquitoes? What if, if i dont kill them, they would bite me. Embarassed

No matter what reason you kill it for, there will still be negative karma.

Posted this two/three years ago:

Hello, my master Ven. Shen Kai offered a solution to Ants and #^@$roaches. He also mentioned about mosquitoes (but I can't remember well for that one). I will summarise a few points below.

Ants - put some Mei2 You2 near their home, they dislike the Mei2 You2 and will definitely move away from their home to somewhere else. To give the ants a sense of direction where to go you may put some food nearby, and they will go and live there. But don't put the food too far as it may be difficult for them to travel that far distance.

#^@$roach - get some empty Wu3 Jia1 Pi2 Jiu3 (a type of Chinese traditional beer?). #^@$roaches love to have a beer and will all go inside. Then you can throw the cans into a dirty place i.e trash can and let them live in their paradise. I don't know about other beers, you all could experiment yourself.

Mosquitoes - I can remember only he mentioned two ways - burning that mosquito 'incense', or using some kind of electronic device that could make them sterilised and not be able to reproduce babies.

So we do not necessarily need to kill them to get rid of the pests. Wisdom will be of good use.

An Eternal Now SG

Found this beautiful verse:

If folks argue and slander you, let them:
they are playing with fire, trying to burn the sky.

~ Shodoka: Song of Freedom

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