Awakening of Spiritual Awareness (15)
Is cultivation苦? Does practice require苦? Here are some thoughts. Cultivation tests you everywhere. Hardships are always present. Therefore, cultivation is苦. One must cultivate from苦.
Let me ask, where does苦come from? It is not something that heaven has bestowed upon you. Nor is it imposed on you by gods or bodhisattvas to test you. It arises from your own heart’s imagination and calculations of gains and losses, while the external environment and circumstances are beyond your control. Things do not go as you wish. You cannot attain what you seek, and when you gain something, you lose it again. As a result, your inner sensory consciousness gradually leads your emotions toward negativity, accumulating numerous negative thoughts within yourself. You wallow in self-pity and sorrow without knowing how to transform your state of mind or escape this situation; instead, you become trapped in this body and mind’s torment, suffering from the hardships of life.
Those who have begun to awaken their spiritual awareness or are entering the path of practice often receive messages regarding life’s adversities. These messages tell you that life’s poverty, “suffering,” setbacks, “gathering and parting” are what you are destined to experience in this lifetime because you come with a heavenly mission. Heaven has granted you a certain mission; therefore, such tribulations are part of your life journey. All the suffering and setbacks serve to refine and test you. If you accept this perspective and embrace it, then your path toward spiritual awakening will be fraught with difficulties because you do not understand self-reflection or repentance nor grasp the true meaning of life. Life’s experiences are shaped by the continuity of your thoughts; all actions stem from your own heart’s intentions. The imperfections in studies, love, career, marriage, and family arise from deviations in how your heart perceives them. When failures and setbacks are blamed on others or attributed to unfavorable circumstances, it indicates a refusal to acknowledge one’s own faults—your heart is filled with resentment and anger towards others or fate itself. With anger boiling within, judgment becomes skewed as your life moves step by step toward failure.
If you perceive life as苦or practice as苦then you’re walking down a misguided path. The Buddha teaches us why we should cultivate: it is to escape suffering and attain happiness. If today we take苦as our teacher and walk the path of suffering, then the road to awakening will be indefinitely long ahead of us. Practice is nothing but turning inward for self-examination—assessing whether our interactions with people and things are good or evil; eliminating evil while preserving good; always being grateful for others’ contributions. There’s a saying in the Platform Sutra: if one is truly a practitioner, they do not see faults in the world; one should not judge others’ right or wrong based on personal perspectives—that comes from calculating comparisons through discriminative thinking which measures everything against oneself’s standards concerning others’ actions of right or wrong—you cannot transform what others do nor have the ability to do so if judgment arises merely out of thought—it only increases mutual resentment (harmful to oneself) without benefiting anyone else (causing disputes).
by – Teacher Liu Hongming