People often say that it is difficult to detect what is inside the heart. We cannot see through it. Not only can’t we see through other people’s hearts, we cannot see through our own hearts either. The reason why we cannot see through is not due to the lack of ability, but the lack of courage.<\/p>\n
If we cannot see our own hearts, it is impossible to see through others. In our lives, there are matters that we cannot talk about with our friends, situations that we cannot discuss with our parents, and thoughts we cannot tell our spouse. Sometimes, we don’t even want to know them\u00a0 ourselves. But where do we put away these things? Since we don’t want people to know, we put them all inside our hearts. Day after day, year after year, our hearts keep filling up with garbage, hatred, fear, greed, anger, bias, arrogance, doubts, etc. No matter how big our hearts are, they are completely full.<\/p>\n
These feelings accumulate inside our hearts, decompose, and multiply. Inside the heart it is like a jungle of poisonous snakes and wild beasts. It is also like a dark cemetery with vicious ghosts. It does not matter whether you agree with this description or not, the inside of our heart is truly so.<\/p>\n
As we wonder about ourselves before birth, we don’t know where we came from. As we think about ourselves after death, we don’t know where we are going. Looking at the present, we are not in charge of anything and nothing is entirely up to us. Now, we can see that we really do not understand our hearts. This lack of understanding is the lack of observation and lack of clarity. This lack of observation and clarity we call it the lack of lights within. Buddha defined this lacking as the state of ignorance.<\/p>\n
The darkness within our hearts is the source of all our pains. This ignorance and darkness restricts our understanding of true selves. It puts us in a state of reverse. We take illusions as realities; falsehood as truth. We mistook our four elements (earth, water, fire, wind) as ourselves. Consequently, we are in the endless cycle of life and death.<\/p>\n
After we have suffered various pains, to the point that we cannot bear anymore, we will become very afraid of the darkness within our hearts. We will then want to do everything we can to get rid of this darkness, this ignorance.<\/p>\n
We will try to do good deeds, become a vegetarian, follow strict rules, donate, and be charitable. However, they cannot really eliminate the darkness within our hearts. So, we try harder to cultivate ourselves, meditate, repent, etc. To fight against ignorance is a losing battle against ourselves. Our ignorance will not be eliminated.<\/p>\n
Ignorance and darkness are not real. They are but illusions. To fight against illusion is surely to fail. Even if we wear ourselves out, we still cannot win the battle against an unreal opponent.<\/p>\n
Darkness is due to the lack of light. Ignorance is due to lack of clarity. If light exists, darkness cannot exist. If we understand ourselves, ignorance cannot exist. If we want to eliminate ignorance and darkness, we must first understand ourselves thoroughly. Through constant clarity and understanding of ourselves, our hearts will be full of lights. We call this approach, “the lightening of the light within.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
People often say that it is difficult to detect what is inside the heart. We cannot see through it. Not only can’t we see through other people’s hearts, we cannot see through our own hearts either. The reason why we cannot see through is not due to the lack of ability, but the lack of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":15,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/is-zen.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/33"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/is-zen.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/is-zen.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/is-zen.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/is-zen.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/is-zen.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/33\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":118,"href":"http:\/\/is-zen.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/33\/revisions\/118"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/is-zen.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/15"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/is-zen.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}