The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast Archives

The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast Script 88 (85)
Sunday 4 June 2000

 

Today's Script is entitled: Do wise persons do the easy things first?

 

People of great accomplishment are held in high regard in every society.

Wise persons move through life in well-ordered paths by a series of what appear to be easy steps and this allows them to give 'story-breaking' proclamations almost suggestive of them having knowledge of the way things will unfold.

They have vision of what they want to do and it would seem that all wise persons have at least two traits in common.

One is the will to do the task of their choice to completion and the other we will call 'the perfection of patience'.

Of the persons who come to our Centre over the years, a few become sufficiently wise to manage our organisation in the future times. We are very fortunate in that we attract a higher percentage of persons who stay with us long term than any other comparable organisation.

This is because we are systematised in our approach to the absorption of persons in our culture of commercial and economic development.

New members are encouraged to study at tertiary level. If they have one degree they are encouraged to undertake further postgraduate studies over time. Members are expected to adjust to the fact we are a learning organisation and not a mere social welfare organisation. Our five styles of conduct are taught over some years.

Persons who have not mastered these five styles are given plenty of work to do but do not have a place in our higher level tactical implementation planning.

A high degree of interest in political and social cohesion is offered by Buddha Dhamma education.

Any Member who is not interested in the mastery of current technical skills as part of their general education will not fit in to our administration systems which work off integrated data warehouses.

We estimate the training of a Member who comes here twice a week costs us about $100 per week. We estimate the training of a Member who comes here once a week costs us about $75 per week. On five-day Bhavana courses, training costs can run to $100 per day per Member.

At critical times in the development of Members, we do supply them with rare valuable artifacts for them to use to build a suitable altar at their own homes. Some of these artifacts have a market value of $500. In addition, we arrange wholesale purchase of special images that are not generally available in Australia and sell them to Members at cost which might be 80% below what they could expect to pay if the images were available from a retail outlet.

This loss of profits is freely given because the religious practice cannot take place without the suitable artifacts in place in their own home.

At times, precious things such as relics are given to Members.

Teachings are given at no charge. This is called Dhamma Dana and is the highest form of generosity.

The membership costs per year are kept to a nominal figure of $33 Joining Fee, $33 Annual Subscription, $33 Annual Library Fee, $66 Chan Fees per class and $44 Software Fee. All of these fees are GST inclusive.

Against this cost structure that is covered year in, year out, for decades, we need to build sufficient long-term stability to last for five hundred years.

We cannot afford to deal with unteachable persons or persons who are mere users of wealth.

For 40 per cent of persons who contact us once a year, half we recognise as having little merit so we cannot help them even a little because they are in denial of the gravity of their lifestyles.

The second half have vast merit and bless us.

They may be great Monks or Nuns or Buddhist Leaders from interstate or overseas who are busy persons with their own Temples to run but who make the time to pay us a visit for a day or two when they visit Victoria.

Others in this blessed group include Buddhist friends on their annual pilgrimage to our Centre.
We make our resources and time available to the second half with pleasure.

For the first half whose despair can last several months, we cannot afford the financial or human resources to provide on call what they think they need.

These persons in the first half of the 40 per cent are referred to "last resort" providers such as, AA or Government services.

In the next 30 per cent of persons we meet face to face at our Centre, we can help a lot for a few days. They might be persons or organisations in need of data.

Some are doing assignments for University or TAFE or secondary school or the scouts and they need information to answer there questions.

In the next 10 per cent of visitors we help, we can help a moderate amount with expertise on their professional or personal problems we might give intensive help for about a month.

In a further 10 per cent of visitors, we can help a sustainable amount in complex issues and they might visit once a week.

Of the remaining 10 per cent, they have enough merit to visit twice a week for us to teach for one year or longer.

Over a decade or so, a few of those persons within that last 10 per cent flourish and form themselves into our next generation of leaders.

While we find most persons have the will to start and complete a short-term task, we find they lack the vision needed to achieve medium-term project management.

What they set out to do fails or drops away because somewhere in the lived process of doing, they think they perceive the completion of the task to be out of their reach.

We find some persons think that great accomplishments are something that can only be done by others who live in a different social class or occupation or suburb or age or educational background.

Some persons use gender or race issues as an alibi to quit the process of doing a project about something special before they complete it.

At our Centre, sometimes we explain things in terms of rational emotive therapy, to show that dropping out for such reasons cannot be logically justified.

During the last decade, we see patterns of adoption are appearing from overseas visitors who bring in their sisters and cousins who are orphaned in acts of war in the country of their origin.

Relationship difficulties are relatively common where there was a history of neglect of persons coming from a former war zone.

Before persons fail, they show difficulty in forming relationships with their fellow country persons who have settled in Australia and show indiscriminate relationships towards others.

Some give up in despair and suicide.

We make sure that persons who are taught at our Centre cease to use their despair as a relationship tool or a reason for giving up or to wonder what went wrong.

It is not satisfactory to say: "I was there and I am OK and, so naturally, even though you were there, you will be OK".

This common ordinary view of overcoming despair is to look outside of themselves for success. This is an error of view in our system.

It is better to talk about the experiences frankly as causes from past deeds than to gloss over them.

We must become aware we are not dealing with champion athletes who can run the four-minute mile because they paid attention to the years or lifetimes of training of mind and body that enable this feat to be achieved.

We must be diligent to the fact we are more likely to be dealing with an average person who may have been an animal in a past life than someone who was a successful human recently.

According to an Arab proverb, diligence is the greatest of teachers.

We are certain all our listeners have scores of such proverbs of their own and we apologise if we sound patronising by adding yet another first-order knowledge statement that cannot be analysed to give you a reason for living a sane course of action.

Our higher frame of reference is to use attachment categories to tell our story of how wise persons have their emotions regulated by themselves so they appear to control what experiences are allowed into their consciousness.

We use such frames because they are recommended by wise persons who know how to make different use of intimacy with their primary relationships than persons with high attachment.

For Main and many other attachment theorists, these categories represent a way of being that is set in place at an early age.

For Buddha Dhamma practitioners, these higher categories are held to represent a way of being that was imprinted from many past lives.

Adults who are preoccupied with low attachments pose very different challenges to those adults who have few attachments if they decide to follow the Path.

Persons with high attachments like simple statements of first order and reject complexity of explanation at even 2nd or 3rd order logic.

If you are logical, I hope you bear with us while we go back to basics.


A first order statement that is now too stale to inspire is the childish statement that the difference between the champion and the also ran is very small, but it is only the champion who gets the accolades.

Persons with high attachment think such a statement is profound.

Persons with high attachment try to manipulate their relationship to a Buddhist Teacher into a parent-child relationship.

Since it is not the policy of our Centre to waste resources just to play mind games with fools, we reject some persons who are looking for that script.

It is Buddha's Teaching not to associate with fools and we take this advice as a prime value.

While the majority of such foolish persons exhaust their libido (their life force) watching the champions from the sideline or a television screen, they are unlikely to formulate an easy path to emulate their heroes.

What do wise people know about turning thought into action that many others do not?
Wise people understand the law of cause and effect, in other words, they understand how to act to put in place the supporting factors for the achievement of projects of any magnitude.

Unwise persons look at the final outcome without understanding the process or map or path that was followed to get there.

Buddhist therapy deals over and over with loss, separation from and possible reunion with fools that is experienced by the Student.

In many cases, he or she fails to see that their present Teacher is unlikely to be foolish enough to be involved as cause or effect in their past lives.

The overt demands of foolish Students are not met by secure Dhamma Teachers who have heard such demands from many unwise persons who are impatient for wisdom.

For example, when a wise student first begins to meditate they set out to accomplish first rupa jhana, then as this mental state is perfected they move slowly to perfect 2nd, 3rd and 4th rupa jhana in that order.

The most common defect of an unwise beginner is his or her inability to lay down their habits of incorrect thinking; meaning not to put first things first and, so, not to attempt to enter 4th rupa jhana first.

What causes such inability to do first things first?

It is our self-nature of being foolish.

Foolish self-nature may be regarded in many ways in many Buddhists texts but one popular way is to treat it as a complex disease of various sorts caused by attachment.

The notion of distinct categories of attachment, or of "styles" of affect regulation, has recently received some support from the domain of neurobiology (Schore 1994). The assumptions underlying the assignment of attachment type remain unacceptable to many clinicians.

Just as they are leery of the problems inherent in the notion of diagnostic categories and labels, they are wary if not outright rejecting of attachment classification, and skeptical as to its clinical relevance.

Given the history of psychoanalysis, it is obvious why the notion of attachment 'types' raises hackles among psychoanalytic clinicians.

It does not make sense to think of patients in terms of single, mutually exclusive attachment classifications that presumably remain stable within the clinical situation.

It is too often the case that patients fluctuate among modes of defense, particularly when they have been in treatment for some time and their defences necessarily become more fluid.

Using attachment classifications as guides in clinical listening was suggested by Blatt in 1995 and Lichtenberg in 1989.

In essence, attachment categories tell a story.

Some of the stories are about why persons display such habits of self indulgence in ignorance caused by pride and jealousy.

Other stories are of persons whose self-inflicted obstructions are caused by concupiscence, anger, stupidity and love; of laziness and gluttony.

With their belly full with the above defects, how can they be responsive to the truth of non-clinging as desirable action?

When a person breaks apart a few of the strings of these unwise old cultural patterns, it is accompanied by an emotional process that feels like distress.

Within a few seconds, the natural tendency of the foolish person is to stop this attempt at cultural change and revert to the status quo. Wise persons know the distress can be conquered and the fear of loss is overcome.

Some persons have retreated from this paradox billions of times in the past so no amount of strong resolve in this life can allow them to continue.

In their case, in the battle between will and a search for comfort they give up as usual.

However, in a Dhamma field that arises from Buddha, the possibility, so rare to find, now exists that we might win through the process of learning by not giving up because we develop patience.

This patience can come from communal as well as individual merit-making at a suitable location such as our Centre where what is wise is known and practised.

Over generations, these activities have long shadows stretching to the next generation because we conserve and record our methods and place them on our websites so others can find the way and win a Buddha Field with ease.

Most texts state that within the next 2500 years, our Buddha field ceases on this planet and persons are back at base one, as it were, where no amount of strong resolve would allow them to become a victor and gain the many insights we teach at our Centre.

This is still a Teaching era, and for some persons the wise practice of our know-how we teach now gets results.

Because these are difficult times, we can use the way of learning Buddha Dhamma called the graduated path where we arrange for the easy things to be done first.

For a few persons, it is possible for them to remember where and why they left the Middle Path in former times and in some cases act so not to repeat that former error.

It should be obvious to many that great Teachers appearing in the world today must have practised well in many past lives and perfected several good qualities.

Generosity in past lives brings considerable wealth generation ability in this life.

Great wealth well applied means one person can cause many Temples to be built in many countries.

By cause and effect, a person can get great loss of wealth in one country, yet movement to another country where good deeds were done in former times can produce wealth.

When this is understood then the good causes from early lives may appear and causes for wealth may reappear.

To become a King or Queen for one life where you have wealth as your birthright requires a world cycle of merit making.

When the merit made in earlier times is spent and runs out, the Kingdom may be lost.

The capacity of the Dalai Lama to lose great wealth in the country of his birth and yet have sufficient causes for the generation of millions of dollars of wealth in Europe is a well-known story.

If someone bothered to do the balance sheet of his loss and gain of assets over this life, it may well be a hundredfold deficit overall.

Life in a Dhamma ending Age is like that.

The 20th century has seen billions of dollars of Buddhist property destroyed, as well as the loss of Monastery wealth throughout the world in such places as Cambodia, China, Laos, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Myanmar (formally Burma) .

All these things show the conditions are not localised to one State.

It may be in future times that if his Holiness was ever born in a European country he would repeat his pattern of losing the use of his birthright wealth in the country of his birth.

So over time, the wise persons understand what they have been seeing; that if even very senior Monks are powerless to stop the drift of the wealth destroyer causes operating in their country this life then we know this will happen to us in our future, unless we wake up as laypersons who grasp at the need to sow good causes in this very life.

Our Teacher has been explaining these simple facts for decades to our Students.

Those Students who have stayed attentive for decades at our Centre are not surprised when they see the profound doctrine of karma and elaborate methods of merit making we use fruit to preserve our Centre.

We do not print predictions of the length of time we believe other Centres have to last in this country because such things are not conducive to peace of mind.

When the time is right, we suggest changes that may help preserve the Dhamma Giving Centres.

The wise have this type of knowledge as wisdom so they are clear that wealth is only a very minor blessing. This statement is a high order knowledge being canonical.

The Tipitaka states the merit of providing an operating Temple is vast.

Those who do such things are remarkable persons.

Venerable Master Hsing Yun was the host of the World Fellowship of Buddhist conference at the Nan Tien Temple in Berkley, New South Wales in November 1998, at which eight of our Members attended as rapporteurs and our Teacher and President attended as delegates.

Master Hsing Yun, by his capacity to draw wealth enough to build large Temples, has transformed the role of Chinese Buddhism in the modern world.

Under his leadership, large centres have been established in other places apart from Taiwan, Los Angeles and N.S.W.

He has more Temples in Australia including one at Bayswater, Western Australia.

The Venerable Master visited that Temple in November 1999.

Among his organised groups throughout the world, this Venerable Master is known as a high achiever when it comes to building Temples.

Fu Chi-Ying noted in the biography of Venerable Hsing Yun that he is a monk who is unafraid of wealth, unafraid to create wealth and unafraid to utilize wealth.

"I'm both a giver and a taker of wealth", the Venerable said candidly while discussing the prevalent view in some circles that poverty stands for cultivation and wealth is another word for vulgarity.

 

In Asia, many years ago, colonising European powers following either Catholic and Protestant Christianity funded religious bodies to help them colonise the hearts and mind of the persons they sought to control.

Those wise persons who know cause and effect can see such persons were not forced to follow the foreign religion but driven by a perception of economic incentives.

Just as there is not a consensus that a child whose conception depends on in vitro fertilisation from unknown male sperm, there were silent internal working out of the relationships for the term of the grandparent's life who followed Buddha Dhamma and the children and grandchildren who adopted the foreign religion.

Many colonised persons admired the financial strength of their missionaries who could deliver free useful goods and services to them. Given the normal pattern of social rearing their children followed the new religion.

As many parts of Asia have been undergoing decolonisation, the present generation has became richer by exploring their religious heritage and great interest is shown in what their forebears valued as religious cultivation.

We have considerable information on such matters from a detailed history of many countries preserved in the rare books section of our library and from stories told to our Founder in the 14 countries he has visited over the years.

We need to do further research and record this Buddhist history and make it available world wide to the new generations that seek such information. This research costs time and money.

We believe that Australian Buddhist lay persons will not shy away from providing money for such matters.

The wise have a sense of history based on research from panels of scholars from many nations papers such as the UNESCO history of the world series.

If you have the merit, you give a portion of your wealth for the preservation of historical writing because you understand wealth is a requisite for research and publication and without it one doesn't want to achieve anything in this area.

We cannot enter into dialogue with persons who discount history.

How ought Temples best put to use the devotees' good wealth, clean wealth, and sacred wealth for the benefit of all living beings is the question we review at our Centre every month.

Our current answer is to build more websites and use some for e-business to fundraise for us.

Within a week or so, we believe we will operate our new multimedia website www. bdcublessings.one.net.au . (repeat)

In our view, our new site will reach many corners of the world and bless viewers from the internet at an affordable cost.

CDs have been produced by us showing the website content and we will sell these to selected persons. Please contact us for prices. Soon GST will apply to these sales.

We are using such productions to break up the racist old monoculture of persons by using Pali language on this website.

With the skill and knowledge we have acquired in the production of multimedia we can now have a new resource of colour pictures, video and audio clips taken during actual ceremonies at our Centre and put on our new website to bless persons.

This is a form of financial wisdom we have found that is useful compared with other means of delivery.

Wisdom tells us to hurry to speed further development and put into action test platforms at our Centre with more know-how enabling us to use many written tags or short spoken messages in languages other than English for our photographs which we are scanning into our new Local Area Network.

Later, when we have developed and tested these new interfaces on our Local Area Network, we plan to put the indexed photographs and tags content onto a third website.

If listeners wish to make good causes to help their future internet studies, you can make a good set of causes to help many persons by coming to help us on this project with the scanning of heritage photographs and preparation of indices.

When you ring us refer to this project as PHOTOLAN.


To fund such PHOTOLAN we must raise monies and request the free know-how of skilled internet persons.

If you have skills and qualifications or equipment to donate and can make the time to help please contact us.

Your donation of time and equipment we need helps you overcome the culture of poverty.

We believe in DANA and practice causes to get IT systems by recycling our older equipment.
We have given computers to Buddhist monasteries in India and Bangladesh.

When we update our equipment, we give our older equipment to the Australian charity PCs FOR KIDS.

They help in third world countries.

We have a truckload of equipment ready for them and are planning to deliver more next week. This is DANA.

DANA is the Pali word for many types of generosity with kind action.

One of the achievements that wise persons cultivate is not to destroy dwellings completely or to destroy the means of wealth production.

Building an addition to our Temple (a new bedroom and storeroom) is underway.

Members have been digging stump holes this weekend.

If you are healthy, please come and help us dig foundations this afternoon.

Such simple actions as digging the foundations of a Buddhist Place has helped many others who have many problems that arise from greed for gambling.

Usually, when greed is burning no amount of money can slake that thirst of thirsts.

There are many ways younger persons can overcome greed to get rich.

But it is better they seek to establish or mould or interpret their identity in the face of rapid modernisation of the economy than stay with the old economy.

We help persons not to develop consumer fever with envy.

A few weeks ago, our Teacher advised a person how to help his wife who had this disease.

His wife was spending $100 000 a year in housekeeping for her and her 6 year old daughter.

The wife wanted more housekeeping money to spend.

She thought she was some kind of an achiever if she spent more money than her friends.

Our Teacher advised this sad husband to stand firm and reduce the money available to his poor deluded wife by two-thirds that very day.

He was successful and his wife came to visit our Teacher this week with a firm resolve to moderate her spending.

One of our Members gave our Teacher some expensive French skin creams he bid for at auction and he was able to give her these gifts.

In the course of our Teacher giving her these gifts, she understood it was our Teacher's past generosity that enabled him to receive such gifts.

Over the decades, many persons have visited our Centre looking for an answer to some attachment problem in their lives.

There are three levels for identification of our Members that can enter into a person's psyche when we choose to act as alternative attachment figures other than a person's mother.

The first identification is to look for use for provision of physical and emotional care.

When we raise monies for overseas orphans we act in this way.
We turn back the first form of suffering - the dukkha of poverty.
We provide the essentials of physical support when we have a Monk resident for periods of time ranging from staying overnight, to a week or so, to a full rainy season.

The second identification is bringing to mind the cognition that there is a process of heterogeneous continuity in the field of each person's future.

Once a person understands he or she cannot preserve his or her monoculture, the way is open to give consistency in life by knowing change.

The person then joins the ancient Noble established wise community (the Sangha) that lives with certainty about the three marks of existence including anicca.

The third identification is the willingness of our Members to give an emotional investment into the lives of a substantial number of persons in many countries.

After a few years of self-help support by Members of our Centre many persons have meaningful work with sound future prospects in the information age.

So always there is more learning activity needed for developing a personal life plan, and there is less and less tendency to forget the skills needed for new life plan path commenced at the first visit to our Centre.

An awareness arises that it would have been easier if a visit to our Centre was a path of first choice rather than an action of last resort.

As the Members minds become more powerful they come to see below the surface of simple statements.

The search for a form of hegemony that former atheists or persons who appear as agnostics reach with others who oppose the control of organised religion is seen as futile and dangerous because such persons may well abandon morality precepts.

Foolish persons who are seduced by the "anything goes" dogma over time fall under the influence of the real Maras. They are told to reject religion by mad, bad or sad advisors who bring a biased version of religious excess.

From that information, they form a belief system that no goodness was ever done in the ancient world and that those smart ones who know the modern world reject the need for morality.

The cultural, sociological, economic and psychological forces that bring about the collapse of a weak belief system are not strong enough to make much difference in simple rural or the industrial urban societies that lived near factories.

Families dwelling in suburbs zoned residential meant the awareness of a work place and the city business districts zoned as industrial or commercial started to force the collapse of the weak value systems because the separation of a private life community and a work life community and use of public or private transport broke the static nature and low stimuli space where neither could be separated.

Sooner or later the notion came that work values if taught to persons could replace thought or doubt about what they are bringing into existence for themselves in the materialist mainstream that had no place to think about birth and rebirth.

Single target audiences with money to spend turn to multimedia internet sites for alternatives to help them escape work values or the solitude that can be found by living alone in a suburb.

Our Centre's values are not to help them protest against parent control via Christianity values.
Those who had practised Dhamma in the past do well at our Centre.
We are not saying that Christianity was the base cause of the troubles.
We are saying that abandoning morality is unwise action.

In such cases, our Teacher gets those who want to learn how to overcome the infinite boredom that wrong views give foolish persons.

The first of the areas of their life that they need to fix is the abandonment of their culture of stinginess. There is a pattern in the way this culture of stinginess disguises greed and envy.

When wisdom is weak, stinginess can take the form of unbalanced concern for the mental environment.

Taking stimulants such as speed or alcohol definitely does not help your state of mind.

After detoxification, which is no longer done at our Centre, the first planning stage is taught.

A little wise thought or two can appear when we encourage a person to attend to the task of attempting a written life plan each for himself or herself - but the steps needed must be made in real time.

This planning stage takes about three years for most persons before it can consistently turn written do lists into action.

Over that time, persons find some type of wisdom that arises when they see indicators that they cannot get something for nothing as a long term tactic.


The real world does not owe them a living.

When this wisdom insight comes, persons have an imperative need to make causes that ought to be made for success - however they define it.

We have limits of what we see as success and some persons might choose to leave us because we have such well established pathways in this process.

Because we operate globally, we intend to expand in a cost-effective manner by the use of a series of web sites to help Australians and many overseas countries that use English as a second language.

It is most important we continue to strengthen our Members' scholarship base by getting more of our learned papers edited and machine searchable. By scanning more and more of our historic photographs we provide favourable conditions for integrating our scholastic activities with our institutional goals and systems.

The decades of producing written resources and the weight of procedure standards we installed means we only hold a quantity of quality material in IT form.

We estimate we are about to reach a critical mass of 0.2 person years reading time for machine readable stuff within the next two months.

As one of the first Centres in Melbourne to recognise and use IT widely for our planning and administration as the major pathway, we have an embedded culture that is favourable to further e- information storage.

E-delivery and true e-commerce can now follow in a cost effective manner in a series of easy steps.

The five styles have not been compromised as we can follow our corporate written plans.
Many IT plans set up years ago have fruited this year.

Our LAN wired buildings have been normalised for faster delivery.
Small things with low technology can be used by us.
One of our Foundation Members gave us two bags of birdseed this week.
We have set up a temporary tent to store such things.
Temporary space used at our Centre means things are stored in safety away from weather and vermin till our next storeroom is built.

Storage space is provided in the new building - that is why we are in a hurry to dig the stumps.

The many things on our supply chain management plan are made as small steps of what is done first being done in a series and parallel mode without flurry and worry . If we were seen to destroy gifts from benefactors by poor or careless storage it reflects on management of our supply chain . This example shows why planning in small steps is wise.

Our second tier planning occurs till the new building is complete and the fitout plan has succeeded.

We are planning to buy the building materials this week. Donations of timber or building supplies or cash to buy them are welcome. Please phone if you can help us.

If you can practice a little charity to help us now, you ought to get accommodation in the future.
If you are too poor to give money, please help us by giving us your labour to dig post holes today. You can meet some of our Members on the job.

Let us conclude with a story.

A little boy saw the Buddha but had nothing to offer.
But the little boy had a lot of wisdom.
He picked up a handful of golden sand and offered it to the Buddha thinking it was real gold. He was born very rich for six lifetimes after that event.
So, wise persons can do easy things first at almost no expense.

With advance planning, after all, in some future life it ought not be difficult for you to remember to offer a handful of sand if you donated to a Temple this life but, it might not be possible for most poor persons who never donated to a Temple to even consider the possibility of such a transaction.

Because the wise understand how the components of a life come together they are able to see the sanity of practising dana or generosity by doing easy things first in this life.

May you be well and happy and grow in wisdom.

However, when a person's life is dominated by the assumptions of a monoculture, they do things in the false belief that they can operate on eka or one strand, when in actuality the fact is things happen as the multi-strands appear as events.

If you were wise enough to understand the higher levels of knowledges that arrive because you made good causes then you would have a firm belief in Dhamma and causation would not be a problem.

A lack of wisdom starts from a lack of a firm belief in Dhamma and events became a problem. This leads to a lack of belief in cause and effect. Hence there is no belief in the usefulness of making merit both personally and socially.

When good things happen they are not luck - they come from causes.

The problem for Australian students from a Christian background is that they think God can send messages as punishment for bad deeds but when mature in wisdom the students cease to believe in the power of vengeful gods to do things that make it hard at times.

Over time, they learn to understand that, like it or not like it, hard times come from lack of merit and they see hard times do not come to their Teacher.

Most students have not enough merit to see and act or do the things a teacher can do with ease.

They need to act to make merit to become relatively free of disquieting uncertainty or doubt about who they "really" are.

As this insight knowledge arises, they develop the perfection of patience (khanti) which they do not have, not before experienced, and know it for what it is.

Wise persons know who they "really" are - they experience it second by second and it is this awareness that makes sure that a solution is not waiting to be found to a problem.

Solutions are more often than not created from compromise of the elements at hand.

Because a unique solution may not be known to exist, we say it does not exist in the world and is a creative act by the individual team Members acting in concert.

Whoever thinks that the solution comes without effort is not wise.

May you develop wisdom and patience.


This script was written and edited by John D. Hughes, Vincenzo Cavuoto, Brendan Halls, Julian Bamford and Leanne Eames.

Disclaimer:

As we, the Chan Academy Australia, Chan Academy being a registered business name of the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd., do not control the actions of our service providers from time to time, make no warranty as to the continuous operation of our website(s). Also, we make no assertion as to the veracity of any of the information included in any of the links with our websites, or another source accessed through our website(s).

Accordingly, we accept no liability to any user or subsequent third party, either expressed or implied, whether or not caused by error or omission on either our part, or a member, employee or other person associated with the Chan Academy Australia (Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd.)

This Radio Script is for Free Distribution. It contains Buddha Dhamma material and is provided for the purpose of research and study.

Permission is given to make printouts of this publication for FREE DISTRIBUTION ONLY. Please keep it in a clean place.

"The gift of Dhamma excels all other gifts".

For more information, contact the Centre or better still, come and visit us.


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