Good morning!
After yesterday’s snowfall with chill, we have now a bright sunny Sunday morning with sittings and service. Interested in the title of “Heaven and Hell,” I took a look at Kurosawa’s film on the Internet World TV. It is the story of a medical intern living in a hellish state (heat and chill) in a low district, who abducts a chauffeur’s son (mistaken as his employer’s, who is a company president living in a heavenly house on a hilltop). This looks like terrorists and imperialists. Heaven and Hell in our ideas and ideologies are all in our karma creations.
Our karmic ideas and actions create all the problems and sufferings in our world, as we seek imaginary heavens and hells based on our karmas, essentially on our triple poison of desire, divisiveness, and delusion. The triple learning of morality, concentration, and prognosis are their solutions. Delusion (nescience, a-vijjhā: a-vidyā or no witness of nirvana: lit. no-wind, of karma) and desire (craving, lit. thirst: taṇhā: tṛṣṇā) are called the two roots of samsara and suffering, respectively. Their two solutions are awakening and nirvana.
The four holy (hagia, ariya) truths (of suffering, source of suffering, cessation of the source of suffering, and path of the cessation of the source of suffering) are the prognosis for our samsara suffering. The holy eightfold path is right (sammā: samyak: lit. comprehensive, total) view, thinking (prognosis limbs), speech, action, livelihood (morality limbs), mindfulness, striving, and concentration (concentration limbs). These are in concrete attention and action and are for the fourfold limitlessness – or fourfold Brahma-viāra (Divine abode) – and the four embracing matters.
The fourfold limitlessness is compassion, friendship, joy, and equanimity (upekhā: upekṣā: lit. throwing away, renunciation). The four embracing matters are giving, loving words, beneficial actions, and sameness (being and doing the same). We are all karma-heirs, karma-owners, karma-machines, and karma-refuged, so can practice the four applications of decreasing, stopping bad karmas, starting and increasing good karmas. Please continue in your four universal vows of saving all, severing all defilements, learning all dharmas, and achieving unsurpassed awakening.
1/10/16
