Good morning!
Yesterday in Japan people had the 20th Anniversary Memorial Ceremony of the
Great Earthquake in Hanshin Awaji with more than 6,000 casualties. Four years ago
they had the Great Earthquake in East Japan with more than 20,000 deaths. In
Lisbon an earthquake and tsunami claimed more than 40,000. In WWII more than
100,000,000 perished. Now, more than 40,000 species per year become extinct.
Global warming burns and buries the life system and nuclear holocaust will wipe out
life from our planet any moment.
Where do these disasters and destruction come from? They come essentially from
human karmas, which drive us into the triple poisons of craving, anger, and delusion,
the source of suffering. It is critically essential for humans to wake up from these
dreadful dreams and delusions. Human karmas are ingrained in our bodies, brains,
and bio-spheres through our genes, genus, and generations throughout evolutions
and environmental manipulations. A rat-race in any domain is doomed to demise,
never to development in wholly wholesome way world.
This is due to the defect denounced in the Dhammapada we read recently:
Those who consider non-essence as essence and view essence as non-essence
Never witness essence living in the realm of false thinking.
Dhp. 11
The original word for essence is sāra, meaning “heart(wood),” “coeur,” and “core.”
But it is not a hard substance, it is rather “fluid,” the “extract” from plants squeezed
or strained of scums, sediments settled, as in sam-sāra (total flow). Someone
reflected on the earthquake and remarked that he sought something essential, not
destroyed by an earthquake or the earthly. Humans are deluded by non-essential
things like materialism, militarism – essentially me-ism – and they destroy
everything, including themselves.
This sāra is reflecting samāhita (from samādhi, jhāna, zen), pasanna (pra-sanna,
from sad, sat, settled,serene, purity), sammā-sankappa ( sammā from sat, to be,
right thinking), etc. in the preceding verses. That is nirvana, pure peace conditioned
by nothing, no karma wind blowing up and down. It is amrita, ambrosia of
immortality, whose gate the Buddha opened for all to witness and win – not wining
in the world of karmas, secular or religious. The Buddha said religion means
cultivation. Only practice makes perfect.
1/18/15
