Wake Up from Your Dream – part 5

Q: The Buddha reached enlightenment, being Buddha, after many lives of good living. How can the ordinary people, use the “shortcut” to achieve enlightenment or heaven in this life?

M: No, it isn’t. How do you know you have not been good in many lifetimes? Can you prove it to me that you have been very bad? Can you prove it to me that Buddha has been good in many lifetimes? He only told you and you are only using hearsay. You don’t know if it’s true, and you don’t know if you have been good or bad. So why should we be so negative? We must believe our worth, because God said that everyone is made after the image of God and we are exactly like God. So why should we feel that we are inferior?

The Buddha, whether He was very good and noble in many lifetimes, that I don’t know. But I know He didn’t do anything during His lifetime, except after enlightenment. He was born in a palace and He was looked after so exceedingly well. Then He was married and He had five hundred wives apart from the main one. He had many beautiful girls, and dancers who looked after Him and who danced for Him every day, every night. And He had four palaces for four seasons. He spent all the taxpayers’ money in His country for thirty years. Now you tell me what kind of good things He did that He was entitled to enlightenment. It was already said that enlightenment is a gift from God. It’s not achieved through virtues or charitable deeds.

We can all get enlightenment. We can all become Buddha, or at least become liberated. Otherwise, why would God send Jesus, Buddha or Mohammed to us if we are so hopeless?

If only the virtuous people can achieve enlightenment then I don’t really know who is virtuous because there is a saying that, every Saint has a past, every sinner has a future.  We are not that sinful as we think. Sin is also an illusion. After you understand this – no sin, no virtue. But you have to work hard to understand this and then you are free. The Quan Yin Method offers you this free way to understand your Self immediately – that you are originally noble. After that, maybe you’ll be able to see into your past lives and you can tell me whether you have been doing good or bad.

Q: You were just saying the enlightened one can only act from the divine Will. How can the enlightened one be held responsible for his or her behavior or can he/she act in whatever way he is guided? How can we know who is enlightened? Can we trust them?

M: You can’t. You don’t. You don’t know who is enlightened. You can’t trust anyone, except yourself. If you cannot trust people, then pray and look into yourself. See if your motive is sincere, if you are pure. If you truly want enlightenment then you will meet a right Master. All depends on you, not on the whatever Master, if you are pure. Like attracts like.

If anyone who happens to stumble onto a lousy “Master” or bad “Master”, that’s their own fault. They should check their own behavior, their own motives, their own purity, their own sincerity. Then pray again. God will guide them to another Master. There’s always the law of supply and demand. Ask and it shall be given. Knock and it shall be opened.

Q: Why do we not remember the precious lives and deaths?

M: Because it’s too much for us to cope with, too much burden. We have enough to deal with today, with taxes, with wars, with children and with our own immediate problems and karma. Should you know that you have been such and such or very bad, very good or very noble in the last life, you would be more confused, and you could not focus on the task at hand in this life. Therefore God, or the natural law, draws a curtain. You’ll know it when it’s necessary. You’ll know it in time. In meditation, sometimes you know it too, if it should be necessary for your progress. You won’t know also, if it is not necessary.

Jesus also said: Do not worry about tomorrow, it’s enough that we take care of today. If we don’t want to know about tomorrow, which affects us, which is important to us; how much less should we know about the past which is already gone.

Q: What is the form of Buddha’s wisdom? Is it revealed in logic, intuition or something beyond these?

M: Beyond all these things. Whatever we can think of is not yet Buddha’s wisdom. Buddha’s wisdom we can only know it when we reach it. We cannot express it, but we know so definitely like black and white when the situation arrives. I mean you don’t go around all day and carry your Buddha’s wisdom with you. You just live in it, live with it, and you are just it.

Q: Can we reduce our karma by praying?

M: Yes, we can if we are sincere enough, because a very sincere and deep prayer is a kind of meditation. We are in a meditative mood. Therefore, it reaches the deepest recesses of our grace store, our merit, our blessing store; and it affects, it cleanses. Only if we are truly sincere and deeply, longing for forgiveness, then it helps.

 

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Real Doctrine and False Doctrine (part 4)

Lecture by Master Ching Hai
October 20, 1986 Taipei, Formosa
(Originally in Chinese)

Part 4- The ancient Masters were very careful in choosing disciples. They would not transmit the Dharma indiscriminately without previously testing the neophytes; instead, the Masters would observe the candidate for a long, long time before giving him any secret. This is a more secure way because the ‘qualified’ disciples will not likely leave the Master halfway and misunderstand the teachings and end up criticizing the master.

Two opposite situations may arise from longtime recitation of the mantras to rescue the ghosts: suffering or not suffering mental disturbance is because his merit is too meager and his ego is too large. “I am so good; I am so compassionate. I recite the mantra to liberate sentient beings, and I give away food every day to help the hungry ghosts.” This great ‘I’ ego will cause the ‘I’ to suffer mental derangement. After reciting some mantras for some ghosts, they felt a sense of superiority, which results in the ego standing in the way, fighting with the inborn morality and modesty, causing some kind of struggle within their mind. If the struggle is not resolved, the disturbance, called the ‘Maya (negative force) disturbance’ will occur. Although Maya represents the negative force, he does not like such negative and proud people and will come to disturb them.

The reason why one would not have to suffer mental disturbances very probably lies in the fact that he has accumulated much merit derived from very hard practice in his previous lives. But this merit is still not enough for him to become liberated, to be a Saint. So he has to come back to this human life, to get married and have children, and then becomes tied up with a lot of worldly obligations like most people. Nevertheless, he still has such stored merit from previous lives.

Anyone who truly has compassion and the will to save sentient beings never will feel superior or proud. The Buddha and Maya will not interfere with those who deeply and sincerely wish to help others and save the hungry ghosts and recite the mantras for the sake of liberating the dead. However for those who have not practiced in this life, their store of merit…all be used up in one lifetime and leave nothing for themselves to bring with them when leave this world; neither have they any merit left for them to be reborn in a higher world. Most people do not know this consequence because they cannot see the Truth.

To further explain this I will cite two allegories. There are two persons, each having no money of his own. The first one wants people to believe that he is very wealthy so he goes out to borrow money from others to spend on himself as well as on other friends and invented for he likes being praised and becoming known. Every day he just keeps on borrowing more and more, going beyond his capacity to repay, until one day he is caught and put in prison. The second one is a person who really wishes to give to poor people though he does not work to earn anything, except having the inheritance from his parents, which he spends day after day till it decreases to nothing.

Similarly, merit can also be dissipated and wasted away. Therefore, in order not to be in debt or become empty-handed, it is necessary for us to look for an unlimited source of supply of infinite merit to rely on. After finding it, however much we want to spend would be no problem at all. Otherwise, it is dangerous for us to do things indiscriminately. This infinite store of merits has its source. Find this source, and get connected with it, then we will have everything we need and even distribute it to countless others.

So, as I have just said, if you have found this source, you can give any merit to any others as much as you like without you yourself being harmed. However, people who find this treasure would never go out and loudly broadcast their ability, neither would they openly, noisily recite any mantra to save any beings. They do not even need to do this, which is only what the negative force has invented and not what Buddha or Jesus Christ taught. What is there to recite? Originally there had not been such things till pure Buddhism was mixed with other kind of superstition to become what it is now (in Formosa), just as it was deviated into Lamaism after spreading to Tibet and became no longer pure.

Why We Need a Living Master – part 1

Excerpt from Master Ching Hai Lectures

Love and respect we must have for any great person, for any great soul, any great practitioners like Jesus or Buddha, those great beings who sacrificed so much for mankind and who have reached their ultimate Wisdom. Love and respect we must always have, even if that person has passed away. But then, we don’t need to devote all our time just to praise them, to worship them and to ask favors from them. Because any person would know that we are living beings, and we need a living Master in order to impart us the knowledge that the past teachers have given to their past disciples. So a living Master we must find.

Past Masters, even if you love and worship them, can only help you to a certain extent because they have left our magnetic field. They have gone to another world, to another kind of dimension to work in their present work, and they are busy over there. So, a living Master is the one who is assigned to do their past work in the present time. It is just like when Mr. Carter was President some years ago, but now it is Mr. Bush. So it is no good to worship and call Mr. Carter to solve your national problems when he is no longer in office. It is not that we don’t like him, or respect his work, or appreciate his job, but he is gone now. We have to leave him so he can do his job and we have to request the person who is presently occupying his position, to fulfill his job for us. That’s all.

Once you leave this physical world, even if you are a very high Master, you cannot help the physical beings any more, but only through an inner communication, which is very difficult to reach for most human beings, save some exceptional persons who have the inborn nature of telepathy, or who are left with some psychic power, or the inner communication ability, through their own precious lives’ practice. We might call this the sixth and seven sense, the highest dimension of understanding. Then, you may even be able to see Jesus without practicing or any prior meditation. It has happened, but not very often.

In your meditation, if you run into any difficulty or if you have any questions, you should pray to God, and try to quiet your mind, and the answer will come or the help will come. Or pray to Jesus or pray to Buddha, or whichever saint you believe in. Our teachings are universal, we have no discrimination between belief systems. Then, I have to add that, if after you have prayed to all the saints, and to God and it doesn’t help, then you can call me to help you. If sounds very self-glorifying, but I tell you because I have to tell you everything, and I have to explain why it is so. It is because I am nearer. A nearer neighbor is better than a far relative. It is very simple and logical. I am nearer because we are in the same magnetic field of the earth. Our energy is intertwined and it is easier to oscillate our energies because we are nearer, we are in the same vibratory frequency.