If You Help And Serve

If You Can Cultivate The Right Attitude, Your Enemies Are Your Best Spiritual Teachers Because Their Presence Provides You With The Opportunity To Enhance And Develop Tolerance, Patience And Understanding.

To Develop Patience, You Need Someone Who Willfully Hurts You. Such People Give Us Real Opportunities To Practice Tolerance. They Test Our Inner Strength In A Way That Even Our Guru Cannot. Basically, Patience Protects Us From Being Discouraged.

Let Us Cultivate Love And Compassion, Both Of Which Give Life True Meaning. This Is The Religion I Preach. It Is Simple. Its Temple Is The Heart. Its Teaching Is Love And Compassion. Its Moral Values Are Loving And Respecting Others, Whoever They May Be. Whether One Is A Lay Person Or A Monastic, We Have No Other Option If We Wish To Survive In This World.

As A Buddhist, I View Death As A Normal Process, A Reality That I Accept Will Occur As Long As I Remain In This Earthly Existence. Knowing That I Cannot Escape It, I See No Point In Worrying About It. I Tend To Think Of Death As Being Like Changing Your Clothes When They Are Old And Worn Out, Rather Than As Some Final End. Yet Death Is Unpredictable: We Do Not Know When Or How It Will Take Place. So It Is Only Sensible To Take Certain Precautions Before It Actually Happens.

We Humans Have Existed In Our Present Form For About A Hundred Thousand Years. I Believe That If During This Time The Human Mind Had Been Primarily Controlled By Anger And Hatred, Our Overall Population Would Have Decreased. But Today, Despite All Our Wars, We Find That The Human Population Is Greater Than Ever. This Clearly Indicates To Me That Love And Compassion Predominate In The World. And This Is Why Unpleasant Events Are "news"; Compassionate Activities Are So Much A Part Of Daily Life That They Are Taken For Granted And , Therefore, Largely Ignored.