俳句 Haiku - Japanese verses

The great current of life

The water that flows in river is real enough in itself, but if you consider it in relation to the whole course of the river, it becomes something illusory.  If you stand and watch it, you won't see the water you are looking at now when you come back to the same place the second time - it just keeps flowing past.  If I step into the river, then immediately lift my foot and put it back in the same place, I won't be treading on the same water that I stepped on the first time, because that water will have already gone past.  So when we step into the water, we are always doing it for the first time.

It is the same with the great current of life: every day that we experience is something completely new, but we are not aware of this at all.  Our days are only the processes of all actions (including acts, speech, thoughts), and that is why they are "like dreams, illusions, bubbles or reflections". You should think carefully about this.  For the enlightened, every day is a new life, so every day they are able to be "lofty and outstanding".  If you see every day of life as being just the same as all the other days, you will end up in depressed, but if you can rouse up your vital energy through Dharma practice, the quality of your life will also rise steadily till it passes beyond the level of normal perception.  This is how it is with the Enlightened One, and anyone has the potential to become enlightened, which is Buddhism in a nutshell.

I?

Every part of the body has its own name. The head is called “head,” the hands are called “hands,” and the feet are called “feet.” You can look throughout all the different parts of the body, but you won’t find anything that is called “I”. Then why is the word “I” used here? It is a general name used to refer to the entire person.

In modern English language, each person refers to himself or herself as I, which is the first person singular pronoun. This is just a sign, a mark, a reference, an expediant, or device without which we cannot deliver any discourse, or make sense of our identity. In the course of deep contemplation towards attaining dhyãnã, the practitioner reverts to a state before the arising of the first thought. When attained, the practitioner knows but he dose not put the state so attained in words because dhyãnã is nirvana, a state beyond description and thoughts.

A Path to Ultimate Happiness

A Path to Ultimate Happiness

Where does man come from and where is he going?

There are three possible answers to this question. Those who believe in a god or gods usually claim that before an individual is created, he does not exist, then he comes into being through the will of a god. He lives his life and then, according to what he believes or does during his life, he either goes to eternal heaven or eternal hell. There are others, humanists and scientists, who claim that the individual comes into being at conception due to natural causes, lives and then at death, ceases to exist. Buddhism does not accept either of these explanations. The first gives rise to many ethical problems. If a good god really creates each of us, it is difficult to explain why so many people are born with the most dreadful deformities, or why so may children are miscarried just before birth or are still-born. Another problem with the theistic explanation is that it seems very unjust that a person should suffer eternal pain in hell for what he did in just 60 or 70 years on earth. Sixty or seventy years of non-belief or immoral living does not deserve eternal torture. Likewise, 60 or 70 years of good living seems a very small outlay for eternal bliss in heaven. The second explanation is better than the first and has more scientific evidence to support it but still leaves several important questions unanswered. How can a phenomenon so amazingly complex as consciousness develop from the simple meeting of two cells, the sperm and the egg? And now that parapsychology is a recognized branch of science, phenomena like telepathy are increasingly difficult to fit into the materistic model of the mind.

Buddhism offers the most satisfactory explanation of where man came from and where he is going. When we die, the mind with all the tendencies, preferences, abilities and characteristics that have been developed and conditioned in this life, re-establishes itself in a fertilized egg. Thus the individual grows, is re-born and develops a personality conditioned both by the mental characteristics that have been carried over and by the environment. The personality will change and be modified by conscious effort and conditioning factors like education, parental influence and society and once again at death, re-establish itself in a new fertilized egg. This process of dying and being reborn will continue until the conditions that cause it, craving and ignorance, cease. When they do, instead of being reborn, the mind attains a state called Nirvana and this is the ultimate goal of Buddhism and the purpose of life.