Life & Body

Impermanence reminds us to cherish the present and to leave flexibility in our plans.

Life’s meaning must appear through the things we are doing and the people we are influencing.

Those things unchanged by death are the essence of life

Please free yourself from life and death: if you do not fear even death, where can fear come from?

You are almost dead—what damn use is money?

You are almost dead—how many regrets remain?

Freedom from life and death naturally frees you from fear;

Freedom from life and death naturally frees you from money;

Freedom from life and death naturally lets you shoulder responsibility.

Those who transcend the mundane stay grounded; those who stay grounded are neither born nor extinguished, drawing on the energy of heaven and earth.

Only by facing the endpoint can we arrange today more clearly.

Turn reflection on life and death into cherishing, responsibility, and fewer regrets.

Hardship is subjective; so-called hardship is merely your subjective refusal to accept it

After setbacks, people understand things they once could not. It is easy to worry further: if someone’s life stays smooth, might they lack chances to mature? This deserves thought, but does not immediately justify “we must make them suffer.”

Growth contains many real challenges. Taking full responsibility for something, handling a disagreement, choosing with limited resources, and owning mistakes can all reveal the boundaries of ability and judgment. These tasks are difficult enough without additional harm.

When helping others, distinguish costs worth trying from risks that should promptly be avoided. Giving room for trial and error while protecting health and essential safety is not contradictory. We can accompany people in bearing results without praising all pain as education.

Setbacks can become material for growth; smooth progress can begin higher expectations. What truly deserves concern is whether experience improves judgment and responsibility, not how much someone has suffered.

Difficulty is both pressure and feedback testing how prepared we are.

First prepare for the worst, then divide what you can do into small steps and complete them.

Enter the mortal world

Find your own way of living

Enter the mortal world to experience and perceive

Realize the mortal world

The mortal world is life

Gain insight through experience

Only striving to experience lets you see through the mortal world

Leave the mortal world

Not detachment

Not escape

But no longer shedding tears for the mortal world

Enjoy everything that exists, good or bad

Use the mortal world

Life is like a play: your way of living determines life

Life is like chess: breadth of vision sketches life

Life is like tea: perception savors life

Life is accidental

Death is inevitable

Use the accidental richness of life to make the inevitable’s colors more splendid

The greatest exhaustion is not hard work, but a suffering heart!

The greatest suffering is “weariness of heart,” one word: “lost”! Not knowing where to go.

As long as someone is not “lost,” even owing hundreds of millions can leave them happy;

Once someone is “lost,” even earning hundreds of millions can leave them suffering.

Being “lost” means “not reaching ultimate understanding,” entering the worldly forms of an unhappy, unsettled, impure life.

As long as you live with “ultimate understanding” and know the “end point,” you will not lose your soul and composure, and energy appears instantly!

Everything that appears in life

Cannot be possessed

Only experienced

Every one of us

Is merely a traveler passing through time

One day

We will part forever with everything

Cherish what is before you

Face what has passed calmly

Gladly accept what is to come

Many masters solemnly say that seeing through the mortal world means avoiding worldly life to become pure and free. I consider them practitioners of ordinary attainment. What is the mortal world? How can one see through it? The mortal world—life.

Seeing through—striving to experience life. What is life?

1. Your own heart (love, hatred, attachment, enmity, temperament, affection, fame, gain)

2. All beings’ human needs (achievement, sacredness, happiness). Great practitioners cultivate a compassionate heart and thoughts for all beings, wholeheartedly delivering themselves and others!

With more experience, we easily draw conclusions quickly. An industry, a lifestyle, a kind of person: seeing something similar seems enough to know what follows. Experience does save time, but may also let us notice fewer new things.

I value experience and participation, an important part of which is retaining curiosity about the world. Curiosity can be concrete: go see something previously not understood; try occupying an unfamiliar role; when encountering another view, first ask what circumstances produced it.

Of course, every experience has costs. Time and the body are limited, and we have responsibilities. What deserves preserving is willingness to understand; whether to participate and how deeply still require judgment. Curiosity and proportion can coexist.

If a person has only conclusions left, however extensive their experience, they may merely keep proving their former self. Leave a door open in judgment, so new experience can enter and old experience can be corrected.

I often say experience and participation have value in themselves. When income is low, the people met, matters handled, and self-knowledge gained can become foundations for later work. But “it is all a gain” cannot explain away every loss.

Having suffered only means hardship occurred. How much value remains depends on whether we know what we experienced: which judgment was wrong, which ability insufficient, which condition previously unclear, and what we plan to change next time. Without this step, the same depletion may recur many times.

Review therefore needs two ledgers: one records what was learned, the other what was paid. Learning deserves cherishing; excessive input, unfair treatment, and harm to health also need serious attention. Growth cannot substitute for judging actual conditions.

Experience becomes a gain when it starts influencing the next choice. As we judge better, protect ourselves better, and do things better, past costs have a chance to become abilities usable in the future.

Before doing something, clarifying what we hope to gain often matters more than repeatedly comparing results afterward. Some seek long-term operation, some learning, some simply firsthand experience. Different purposes call for different measures of the process.

If the original aim was understanding a role’s difficulties, genuine participation, feeling pressure, and seeing process details may already fulfill it. Later demanding excellent performance may add an unregistered competition to that experience.

Purposes can change, but changes require fresh judgment. Does continuing still have value, how much will investment grow, and am I truly willing to bear it? Having already spent time cannot alone justify sending all remaining time after it.

After meeting the original purpose, allow yourself to stop and organize the understanding gained. Experiences have beginnings and may have endings. Returning to your own direction with what you gained is also a complete completion.

Enter life, observe, experience, and review; only then can abstract principles become lived understanding.

A good life is not one without storms, but one that retains direction through them.

Some things we treated seriously at the time still failed to reach the hoped-for result. With some important people, only when we can no longer approach them do we more clearly know their place in our hearts. Some regrets in life truly cannot be repaired.

Accepting this requires room for pain. Handling matters calmly can coexist with sadness; continuing necessary work does not mean the experience no longer matters. Demanding that we immediately move on only leaves real feelings nowhere to rest.

What remains open to choice can be adjusted starting today. Express care earlier, postpone important words less, and be present seriously while there is a chance. Let the irreversible become memory, instead of repeatedly using hypotheticals to demand that reality happen again.

Regret reminds us that time and relationships have boundaries. Bring this reminder into everyday life: care for those still nearby and complete what there is still time to do. Loss cannot be erased, but today can still be cherished.

After ups and downs, I once had a very direct realization: being alive and still physically healthy already deserve cherishing. Other gains are additions to this foundation. While busy pursuing things, this order is easily reversed.

Goals unfinished, income unsatisfying, undertakings incomplete: we keep seeing gaps. Meanwhile, the ability to rest and act, someone to talk to, and the chance to rearrange life—these already existing things gradually become taken for granted.

Seeing them affects concrete choices. Rest when unwell, sleep early for important things tomorrow, and do not exhaust all energy at once. Distant goals remain worth pursuing; the person carrying those goals also needs care.

Cherishing the present need not wait until everything goes smoothly. First acknowledge happiness already possessed, then strive for what else you want, and your inner scale becomes fuller. Life has gaps and can still contain things worth thanking.