..續本文上一頁so all the sufferings that are born from these notions and ideas. That is the essence of looking deeply.

　　"Contemplating Nirvana, I breathe in; contemplating non-craving, I breathe out." If you look deeply into the nature of things, your craving will vanish. It”s not worth your time and your efforts. There are many objects of our craving: fame, sex, money, and good food—I mean the food that can bring a lot of trouble into your body. Looking deeply into the nature of these objects of our craving, you see that they are very dangerous. Not only can they not bring you happiness, but also they will destroy your body and your mind. Those of us who have tried that already have that experience and that insight. Happiness is not made of those objects of craving; happiness is made of freedom, of insight, of compassion, of true love. We can cultivate insight, freedom, compassion, love, and become very happy. Happiness cannot be without freedom. Those of us who have no freedom have no possibility to be happy. How free we are, we know by ourselves. We don”t need another person to tell us how free we are from our afflictions, from our ideas, especially from our ideas. Therefore, looking deeply into the nature of what we crave is a deep practice.

　　The fish sees a beautiful bait, but the fish does not know that inside the bait there is a hook. The fish just swallows the bait, and gets caught by the hook, and gets pulled out of the water. We behave like the fish: we don”t know the true nature of the object of our craving. We have become, many times, the victims of such craving, and we have suffered a lot, and yet we continue the course of running after these objects of craving. When you can see deeply into the nature of your craving, you get free. The Buddha described in many terms the nature of our craving. He said, "Like a person holding a torch and going against the wind, the fire will burn his hand. Those who go after the object of their craving will get burned, bodily and spiritually. Like a dog running after a piece of bare bone, and trying to eat it, no matter how many hours the dog bites at the piece of bare bone, he does not get any satisfaction." No matter how much time we spend with the object of our craving, we cannot get the satisfaction, fulfillment. We think it is happiness, but it is not happiness. Happiness is something else. It is not love, love is something else. It is not freedom, freedom is something else. When you read the Sutra on the Better Way to Catch a Snake, you see how the Buddha described the objects of our craving, and he helped us learn how to look in order to see the dangers of these cravings. Of course we want to attain true happiness. There is a way to attain true happiness, and the practice of looking deeply helps us because when we have seen the true nature of our happiness we no longer cling to the object of our craving.

　　"Contemplating throwing away, I breathe in." "Throwing away" means throwing away ideas. The Vietnamese Zen teacher, Tang Hoi, who lived in the Third Century taught Buddhist meditation in Vietnam, and he went to South China and taught Buddhist meditation in the time of the Three Kingdoms. He described this practice as throwing away, first of all, the two notions. First is the notion that you are this body, "this body is me." The second notion is that "this life span is my life span", meaning that I did not exist before, and that I will not exist after this life span. So these are two basic ideas to throw away. Many of us are caught in the idea that these bodies are ourselves, and this is the origin of a lot of fear and suffering. You are more than this body; you are more than the elements of water, fire, air and earth in this body. You are large, much larger. Your nature is no-birth and no-…

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