..续本文上一页ou translate that into your own life

　　 For example, your family, your job, your social structure: these can be a vehicle for spiritual understanding if you begin to accept that within them there will be frustrations, rather than always trying to rearrange situations to fulfil personal desires and needs. Obviously, if the situation is harmful in some way, then you have to make a change; but the usual humdrum, boring, annoying stuff of life is actually the stuff of Enlightenment, if we are willing to observe how it is. So commitment is very important; and this is what the robe is - it”s a symbol of commitment.

　　Responsibility can be used as commitment, or it can be seen as a burden. I can take on the responsibility of being the senior monk and have kind of a martyr syndrome about it: "Oh, poor me, I have to be the senior monk..." or I can feel great about it: "Wow! Look at me, I”m the senior monk..." or I can just see it as a convention: "I”m senior monk. I”d prefer to be a fly on the wall actually, but there I am: senior monk." Then I watch what it does to me - whether there”s like or dislike, or feeling that I”m doing it well or that I”m hopeless - beginning to observe how the mind functions within that situation, rather than changing or rearranging it according to some personal opinion.

　　So, applying this to your situation, ask: "What happens to me at work

　　" "What happens to me at home

　　" Work is just not always going to be fulfilling, it can be boring, interesting or annoying, but we can make use of this commitment. If we”re always shifting according to personal desire, we can never really understand how it operates in the mind. So commitment is fundamental to understanding our human mind. Now within commitment there are three themes that I find very helpful in my own practice:- discovery, training and purification.

　　Discovery (sometimes called vipassana) is fundamental, because the Buddhist way is the way of awakening. It”s not the way of getting rid of, or attaining to something in the future; these are bound up with ego, aren”t they, with what we call "self-view". Awakening is always something immediate: we awaken... What do we awaken to

　　 To things we haven”t seen before; we discover things we haven”t seen before. So the Buddha”s teaching is pointing out things which are always there, but which perhaps we have not seen before.

　　Now this is how Buddhist concepts can help us; they can awaken us to certain things about human experience which we need to understand in order to be free. They are not just ideas that we put away until our next exam in Buddhism, they are principles and concepts through which we look at life - like lenses. So you can take a conceptual structure, like the three characteristics of existence: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and not-self (anicca, dukkha, anatta) - how do you apply that to your life

　　 For example, anatta, `not-self”: the teaching that this mind and body are not self... But if I”m not this body and I”m not this mind, then who am I

　　... The mind begins to question. The question directs the mind, it starts to awaken us. The beauty of the Buddha”s teaching is that it allows for and uses doubt in a way to liberate the mind. Or take a teaching like anicca: `That which has a nature to arise has a nature to cease” - begin to look at life through that. Life”s experiences are varied, so if I”m always involved in experiences it”s very confusing but if I use this teaching as a lens to look through, I see that that which has the nature to arise also has the nature to cease, and is not personal. So I begin to discover the nature of my conscious experience, because I”m no longer attached to it - I begin to discover things about experience that I”ve never noticed before. An angry thought is not mine, it”s…

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