How can we have wisdom? Go to the Buddhist scriptures to find wisdom. As the saying goes, "Go deep into the scriptures, and wisdom is like the sea." Because the Buddhist scriptures were taught by Sakyamuni Buddha, they are full of wisdom. Mr. Lu Xun once said: Sakyamuni Buddha is really a great philosopher! Great philosopher, great philosopher, he has long given us answers to many difficult problems in our lives. Sakyamuni Buddha is truly a great philosopher. Mr. Lu Xun praised Sakyamuni Buddha and said that Sakyamuni Buddha was a great philosopher. So if we want to have wisdom, we must look for it in Buddhist scriptures. We should recite sutras and understand all the principles and truths in this world and beyond. At the same time, Sakyamuni Buddha also pointed out the methods and paths of practice in the sutra. Jingzhe is also a path - a path, a doorway. This word in the Buddhist scriptures means path. The purpose of Buddha Shakyamuni's practice was to find ways and paths to liberate all sentient beings from their troubles. Finally he found it. He taught eighty-four thousand methods in the Buddhist scriptures. These eighty-four thousand Dharma doors are the eighty-four thousand paths to practice and achieve liberation. These 84,000 Dharma doors can cure 84,000 kinds of troubles and 84,000 kinds of diseases of our sentient beings, so everyone says that Sakyamuni Buddha is the great medical king.
Third, Buddhism teaches the three disciplines of precepts, concentration, and wisdom. In terms of "action" in "Faith, Understanding, Action, and Evidence", the first thing is to observe the precepts.
The precepts are the basis and prerequisite for spiritual practice. If you do not abide by the precepts, there will be no practice and you will not know the Tao. For lay people to practice at home, they have the Five Precepts, the Ten Good Deeds, the Six Perfections, the Eight Precepts of Fasting, and the Bodhisattva Precepts for lay people. These are all the precepts for lay people. As for monks, there are ten precepts for novices, two hundred and fifty precepts for monks, and bodhisattva precepts for monks. The Bodhisattva vows for monks and the Bodhisattva vows for lay people are different. The bodhisattva vows for lay people are six-fold precepts and twenty-eight light precepts, while the bodhisattva precepts for monks are ten-fold precepts and forty-eight light precepts. This is the difference. The five precepts for lay people are the most basic among the lay precepts. The five precepts for lay people are: not to kill, not to steal, not to commit sexual misconduct, not to lie, and not to drink alcohol. Lay people do not engage in sexual immorality, and monogamy is enough. Whether a monk or a layman, Buddhist practitioners must abide by the precepts.
When Sakyamuni Buddha was about to enter nirvana, Venerable Ananda asked the Buddha: When the Buddha was alive, we took him as our teacher. Then after the Buddha passes away, who will we take as our teacher? The Buddha said : Take precepts as your teacher. Therefore, whether we are monks or at home, if we want to practice Buddhism, we must abide by the precepts. Practice concentration and wisdom on the premise of observing the precepts. If you have precepts, you will have a teacher. If you don’t have precepts, you will have no teacher, that is, there will be no Buddhist inheritance.
The second step is to practice concentration. Concentration is meditation. The Indian word is called jhana (nou), which when translated into Chinese means quiet contemplation and quiet thinking. When we meditate and think quietly, it is not that we don’t think about anything, but that we have thoughts and thinking activities. There is also a complete set of practice methods for practicing meditation, and there is nothing to be careless about.
The third is to open up wisdom. Hui is wisdom. Buddhism teaches that precepts generate concentration, and concentration produces wisdom and develops wisdom. These are the three disciplines of precepts, concentration, and wisdom.
Fourth, we must practice both blessing and wisdom.
“If you cultivate wisdom without cultivating blessings, the Arhat will ask for an empty alms bowl.” If you cultivate wisdom without cultivating blessings, Arhats will not be able to beg for donations. We have already talked about how to cultivate wisdom, but how to cultivate blessings? Make alms.
To cultivate good fortune, you must first practice giving. There are three types of giving, one is giving of wealth, the other is giving of Dharma, and the other is giving of fearlessness.
Giving money means that we give money, clothes, etc. to those in need or those in need. For example, we can provide relief to people in disaster areas such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and floods, or people suffering from famine. We go to them to help them and donate money and materials to them. These are all financial gifts.
In addition, aiding out-of-school children, building Hope Primary Schools, etc. are also considered financial donations.
As for Dharma giving, Ren Jing is here to teach everyone the Dharma, which is Dharma giving. Among financial gifts, there are also financial gifts and Dharma gifts. For example, building temples and printing scriptures. Everyone donates money to the temple to build the temple. Once the temple is built and the Buddha statue is built, many people will come to the temple to worship the Buddha and pray for blessings. As a result, they will plant the diamond seeds of becoming a Buddha, and many people will will be educated. A temple will exist for decades, hundreds, or thousands of years, during which time it will educate countless sentient beings. This is Dharma giving. The same goes for printed scriptures. After the scriptures are printed, more people will read them, and they will benefit more people. This is also Dharma giving. In other words, building temples, sculpting Buddha statues, and printing scriptures are both financial donations and Dharma donations. Promoting the Dharma and benefiting living beings is a very great merit. Sakyamuni Buddha once said: Among all kinds of charity, Dharma charity is the best. Giving Dharma is the most extraordinary and has the greatest merit.
Fearlessly giving means using our physical strength and our labor to help others. For example, if an elderly neighbor or a widower can't carry water, you can help him carry it; if he can't carry groceries, you can help him carry it. These are all acts of fearless giving. Volunteering at a temple is also a form of fearless charity. As the saying goes, if you have money, give money; if you have power, give effort. Contribution is a fearless act of giving and has great merit.
Boshan Zhengjue Temple was originally a barren mountain, with ravines accounting for a large part of it. If the ravine is filled in, the size of the temple will be larger, but the amount of work will be correspondingly larger. From the start of Zhengjue Temple construction in the second half of 2002 to the summer and autumn of 2003, more than 200,000 cubic meters of earth and stone work was done, but the ravine was still not completely filled, and the yard was full of stones. At that time, there was a female lay practitioner in Boshan. The doctor performed an ultrasound on her and found that she had a uterine tumor measuring 5.5cm x 4.5cm, which was larger than a duck egg and as big as a goose egg. The doctor asked her to have surgery, but she was unwilling to do it because her financial situation was not very good. She decided to volunteer at Zhengjue Temple, picking up stones in the yard. After picking up stones for half a month, it was almost the August Festival. She went home to celebrate the August Festival and went to the hospital for a check-up. A miracle happened: the hospital's test results showed that her original 5.5 cm tumor had turned into It's 2.5 centimeters, a bit bigger than an apricot kernel, and no surgery is needed. The doctor was very strange and surprised. After the August Festival, the layman went to Zhengjue Temple to work as a volunteer again. She stayed there for about ten days and then went to the hospital for a check-up. The result was that her tumor had completely disappeared, and there was no trace of it at all. This is an example of doing volunteer work in a temple to cultivate blessings, accumulate merit, and receive blessings from Buddha. Big difficulties are reduced to small ones, and small difficulties are reduced to small ones.
There is also a lay practitioner who also has a uterine fibroid, which is about 3 or 4 centimeters in size. In the spring of 2007, I went to Zhengjue Temple and worked as a volunteer at the Zhengjue Temple for a month. Then I went to the hospital for a check-up, and the tumor disappeared. These are the blessings and blessings I get from volunteering in temples and giving fearlessly.
So everyone should not only recite sutras and cultivate wisdom, but also work hard to cultivate blessings and do more good deeds. Only when you have both blessings and wisdom can you become a Buddha, which is called a "Two-legged Buddha."