Letting Go & Liberation · Mind & Practice

When tragedy strikes, you need to let yourself let go; tragedy, after all, cannot be reversed

After tragedy, the road must still be traveled. Only by letting go can you walk well and make life truly rich.

No one wants a life without richness

A lifetime is long

A lifetime is short

Tragedy or richness

Depends entirely on your mindset,

Your thinking determines your fate.

I asked Buddha, “What do nirvana and rebirth mean?”

Buddha said, “Nirvana is ‘non-arising,’ ‘non-doing,’ ‘non-movement.’ Rebirth is your cause: because of what are you born, and for what do you die? If life and death are meaningless, why seek nirvana or rebirth? Everything arises or does not arise, acts or does not act, moves or does not move, from your heart. When you ask this question, it actually means there is no answer.”

There is no Buddha; Buddha does not speak either. Buddha is awakening; Buddha is yourself. You alone are your own master. Cherish every minute and every second. Learning to cherish is nirvana and rebirth.

Only when impermanence arrives do we know this illusory body. I urge you to recollect Buddha often, each thought quieting greed and anger.

Fish tracks in autumn waters, bird traces in the vast sky. Ask where I go: rebirth in the pure realm. Awakened, not deluded; what is born must perish. Returning on the strength of vows, why weep in sorrow?

Our Buddha’s final teaching: take precepts as your teacher. Through precepts cultivate concentration; through concentration develop wisdom. Through precepts, concentration, and wisdom, know suffering and cut off its causes, aspire to cessation and cultivate the path, moving toward liberation.

Purify your own mind: this is the teaching of all Buddhas. Different schools and traditions take different paths to the same destination. Believe this or that; faith is free.

Respect one another, erect no sectarian barriers, practice the six harmonies without contention, unite and help one another. Practice according to the teachings: the five precepts, ten good deeds, four means of embracing others, and six perfections, cultivating step by step.

Arouse intention and cultivate the heart. Without arousing intention, people cannot subdue their troubles. It is like rowing upstream: the current is strong, and unless you row hard upward, you cannot even stay in place; you will surely be swept down. Without arousing upward aspiration and increasing inner wisdom’s strength, how could you simply let go of delusions and troubles whenever you wish?

Unable to emerge, it is hell bound by countless tangled thoughts; able to emerge, it is heaven liberated into boundless seas and skies.

Those of great cultivation enter the mortal world and the ordinary, acting neither strangely nor unusually nor making others’ hair stand on end.

How could the method of inner realization reside in verbal explanations? Is constant Buddha-talk not absurd? Plainness is the Way; ordinariness is Buddhahood.

Many who study Buddhism wear a Buddhist face and air, fill their mouths with Buddhist words, and look sanctimonious. I try to avoid them, for they have become slick Buddhist operators, entering “Buddhist demonhood.”

True practitioners do not put on a cultivated appearance.

Mouths full of Buddhist terms, no earthly language; a solemn dead expression entering a room and polluting the air; assuming an “empty” appearance free of stray thoughts, separating thoughts away only to enter another world of stray thoughts about “emptiness.” Freed from thought’s ropes, they are bound by the ropes of an “empty form,” entering discrimination. One word: “pretending”!

The secret behind great cultivation: connecting with the mortal world, no empty form, true reality, great ease!

Liberation is studying Buddhism; freedom is cultivating the Way

Letting go does not mean denying experience; it means no longer letting experience rule the present.

Settle what cannot be reversed, and reclaim the parts on which you can still act.