When a wealthy person enjoys their lives by in a wasteful way,
it is clear that this person is blessed but is a bad person. Alternatively, if we live a comfortable life but fear we will lose our blessings, than we should actively perform charity, help other people, live modestly and simplistically.
HOW DO WE LIVE MORALLY AND ETHICALLY?
First, you must have a pure intent, meaning you live to be kind and humane. They think about achieving great things for the betterment of mankind and do not think of their individual needs. Most importantly, when attending a temple, they never pray for their individual benefit instead they pray for all of humanity. These people have great virtue and often deities will reincarnate into the family blood line because they can read the pure intent of these people.
The important point here is the intent. Anyone with selfless intent, will have children or grandchildren who will be significantly successful.
For this reason anyone wanting their next of kin to succeed and be outstanding characters, must live morally and ethically virtuous lives. Remember when praying, you should pray for the world, for our nation, for humanity and not for ourselves.
Also, value every life, be modest, live in harmony with others. If you are able to live following these guidelines, deities will choose to be reincarnated into your blood line. Alternatively, you could be reborn in to another family and bring about glory to that family.
But how many generations will deities be born in to the family? This all depends on how much or how little virtue you have. If you have great virtue, gods will be born and reborn in to your family for ten, twenty or even thirty generations. These families will produce eminent heroes who perform extraordinary things. If their blessings are modest, their family will succeed for approximately three generations and then go down.
The amount or strength of our blessings are dependent on our application and practise of Buddha's teachings to truly improve ourselves, thoroughly believe, eliminate selfishness, greed, anger and ignorance, open ourselves to love and compassion for all people and other living creatures. The more compassionate we become the more virtue we accumulate, which will in turn benefit our next of kin for many generations. Buddha taught us to open our heart to love all beings. Therefore, we should pray earnestly to be able to fulfill this compassion whenever we kneel down in front of Buddha.
Every time we meditate to achieve peace in our minds, we should imagine our compassion is covering all beings. If we can do that, we will accomplish great virtue for ourselves. This virtuous charisma will be bountiful and our descendants will benefit from many great achievements in their lifetime.
What about those monks who achieve great morality and virtue but have no children? They will have talented followers and their doctrines will definitely be succeeded and developed. However, only very genuine practitioners and believers of Buddha's teachings will accumulate virtue. Superficial or false practices, and pretending that you are genuine will be unsuccessful in accumulating blessings. For example, if a person often visits temples but his mind is still full of selfishness, dishonesty and he pretends to be gentle and virtuous with a hope that other people respect her. Such person will not have morality.
Continuing on, let us discuss the blessings of the nation. What does it mean to create blessing for a nation of people?
There are two ways this can be done. Firstly, it is dependent on the virtue of the nations ancestors. Secondly, it is dependent on the blessings of the present day occupants. We believe that our ancestors, from the King Duong Vuong, Lac Long Quan, King Hung to many other generations of heroes etc, lived virtuously and accumulated a great amount of blessings. However, it is the present day occupants ability to live moral and virtuous lives that will mandate the blessing of the nation. If each person practices good deeds or perform charitable acts, then the blessings to its people will also increase. It is this blessing (not trickery or civil unrest) that will encourage the nation to become wealthy and prosperous.
Seeing our children live in a rich and prosperous country, we ought to teach them to perform good deeds, to be compassionate, to love and help each other, and from a young age to teach our children to practice conscience in their hearts to become learned behaviour. We must teach them to rid themselves of selfishness, aggression, envy etc... we can do this by reminding them daily to "not live selfishly, to consider how the impact of your actions will affect others, to treat your friends equally and fairly". We ought to repeat this over and over to carve it into their hearts to fight against selfish tendencies that could have transferred with them from their previous lives.
If all Vietnamese children are taught this virtuous way of living, they will all succeed in their adult lives. Which will mean our country Vietnam and all its children will be prosperous. In contrast, if the children cannot learn to live a moral and virtuous way of life, than they will fail in their endeavours and if they fail as individuals the nation as whole will fail.
For this reason, if we want our children to live in prosperity and for our country to be equal with other countries, to help other developing countries, and contribute to world peace, we must teach our children very carefully. We must shape their morals, enable their voice, teach them how to present themselves, never allow them to lie, to speak in an disrespectful manner. We must teach them to be courteous, to respect each other, to live decently and selflessly. It is our responsibility to continuously educate them. If the Vietnamese people all raise their children to live in this moral and virtuous way, then thirty years later, these children in their adult lives will succeed and our nation will be peaceful and prosperous.
We will explore how one should live when they have succeeded and have been blessed? For example, if we are attractive, earn money effort-lessly, lead a comfortable life etc we can assume that we have been blessed.
The two different personalities are: a good person who knows they have been blessed will often fear that they will lose their blessings, however a bad person who knows they have been blessed will over-indulge in their blessings.
So when a wealthy person enjoys their lives by in a wasteful way, it is clear that this person is blessed but is a bad person. Alternatively, if we live a comfortable life but fear we will lose our blessings, than we should actively perform charity, help other people, live modestly and simplistically. We should not be wasteful of money, be thankful for every grain of rice we eat, and be conscious of every drop of water. We too do not use much of electricity for our nation is short of electricity. We also limit ourselves in traveling by car or motorbike minding that gasoline pollutes the air. In our daily hygiene, we do not use a lot of soap or detergent.
We would rather our body or clothes being a little dirty than killing rivers with detergent. If we leave the rivers around us dirty and smelly keeping our body and clothes clean and scented, we will be severely guilty.
Written by:
Janna
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