..续本文上一页ould you feel if sixty dogs were chasing you

　　 Just imagine what your heart would do if you had a pack of sixty dogs chasing after you and people on horseback telling them to get you. It”s ugly when you really reflect on this. Yet that is considered normal, or even a desirable thing to do in this part of England. Because people do not take time to reflect, we can be victims of habit, caught in desires and habits. If we really investigated fox hunting, we wouldn”t do it. If you have any intelligence and really consider what that is about, you would not want to do it. Whereas with simple things like walking up and down on a forest path, and watching your breath, you begin to be aware and much more sensitive. The truth begins to be revealed to us through just the simple, seemingly insignificant practices that we do. Just as when we keep the Five Precepts, that is a field of blessing to the world.

　　When you start reflecting on the way things are and remember when your life has really been in danger, you will know how horrible it is. It is an absolutely terrifying experience. One doesn”t intentionally want to subject any other creature to that experience, if you have reflected on it. There is no way in which one is intentionally going to subject another creature to that terror. If you do not reflect, you think foxes do not matter, or fish do not matter. They are just there for my pleasure -- it is something to do on a Sunday afternoon. I can remember one woman who came to see me and was very upset about us buying the Hammer Pond[8]. She said, ”You know I get so much peace; I don”t come here to fish, I come here for the peacefulness of being here.” She spent every Sunday out catching fish just to be at peace. I thought she looked quite healthy, she was a little plump, she was not starving to death. She did not really need to fish for survival. I said, ”Well, you could, if you don”t need to fish for survival -- you have enough money, I hope, to buy fish -- you could come here after we buy this pond, and you could just meditate here. You don”t have to fish.” She didn”t want to meditate! Then she went on about rabbits eating her cabbages, so she had to put out all kinds of things that would kill rabbits to keep them from eating her cabbages. This woman never reflects on anything. She is begrudging those rabbits her cabbages, but she can very well go out and buy cabbages. But rabbits can”t. Rabbits have to do the best they can by eating someone else”s cabbages. But she never really opened her mind to the way things are, to what is truly kind and benevolent. I would not say she was a cruel or heartless person, just an ignorant middle class woman who never reflected on nature or realised the way the Dhamma is. So she thinks that cabbages are there for her and not for rabbits, and fish are there so that she can have a peaceful Sunday afternoon torturing them.

　　Now this ability to reflect and observe is what the Buddha was pointing to in his teachings, as the liberation from the blind following of habit and convention. It is a way to liberate this being from th, e delusion of the sensory condition through wise reflection on the way things are. We begin to observe ourselves, the desire for something, or the aversion, the dullness or the stupidity of the mind. We are not picking and choosing or trying to create pleasant conditions for personal pleasure, but are even willing to endure unpleasant or miserable conditions in order to understand them as just that, and be able to let them go. We are starting to free ourselves from running away from things we don”t like. We also begin to be much more careful about how we do live. Once you see what it is all about, you really want to be very, very careful about what you do and say. You can have no intention to live life at the expense of any other creature. One does not feel that one”s life is so much more important than anyone else”s. One begins to feel the freedom and the lightness in that harmony with nature rather than the heaviness of exploitation of nature for personal gain. When you open the mind to the truth, then you realise there is nothing to fear. What arises passes away, what is born dies, and is not-self -- so that our sense of being caught in an identity with this human body fades out. We don”t see ourselves as some isolated, alienated entity lost in a mysterious and frightening universe. We don”t feel overwhelmed by it, trying to find a little piece of it that we can grasp and feel safe with, because we feel at peace with it. Then we have merged with the truth.

《Mindfulness: The Path to the Deathless》全文阅读结束。