Good evening!
We have now a nice warm, wet atmosphere, which gives life to plants and animals. Trees survive thousands of years, even ten thousand years. Tree and true have the same root of dhrî (the root form of dharma), enduring and everlasting.
The Buddha was awakened to truth, and was expressed by a tree, the bodhi tree, before being expressed by the dharma wheel, foot prints, and the human figure. Monasteries are called sorin, forest, because practitioners sit like trees, making their states like forests.
One day a Chinese emperor, looking down the Great River, asked a Buddhist monk, “How many boats are plying up and down in this river?” The monk said, “Only two – fame and fortune.” Our goals are usually matter and power, comfort and convenience.
The Buddha said that we feed on the fourfold food – physical, volitional, emotional, and conceptual – like parents, lost in the desert, eating their son’s flesh out of hunger and thirst. Now we are eating our future generations and other species – even the same one.
So, we have militarism, materialism, and me-ism fed by the three poisons of anger, greed, and delusion. All of them poison others as well as ourselves. We had rather sit like trees in truth and harmony, becoming buddhas, and tasting amrita, ambrosia of immortality.
We sincerely hope more and more people will sit and savor, not poisonous food, but amrita, which is good in the beginning, in the middle, and in the end, for themselves and others, living limitless life, light, liberation, and love for the wholly wholesome world!
12/20/11
