TALENTS ARE SOMETHING EASY TO RECOGNIZE THAT NOT VIRTUES.

Virtue is something boundless and extremely precious but very hard to identify. Human wisdom is limited because when you grow old, your brain doesn’t work well. However, talents are easier to be discovered than virtues. Because virtue is not easy to be recognize, people rarely pay attention to it but often praise talents, successful careers, skills and so on since they show quite clearly. Nevertheless, what is clear to be seen/realized is fragile and precarious. Virtue is invisible but sustainable and will help us on the road to supreme enlightenment.

Most of us appreciate talents but not virtues, our careers but not our spiritual cultivation. Usually, we admire a doctor, a millionaire or a person who get promoted to a higher position. However, we seldom respect someone who no longer has anger. It is because virtue is something very broad and abstract. That’s why most of us do not aim to be virtuous but talented and successful. We make so much effort to achieve a doctorate and how to build a large house or how to gain a higher position. So, if someone says, “I do not have anger anymore,” or “I do not have greed anymore,” that person hardly wins respect and admiration from others since people pay scant attention to virtue.

However, it didn’t occur that when you no longer have greed, anger, hatred, selfishness, jealousy, etc. you will contribute so many beautiful things to this life. If there were not Masters who were quite but very virtuous, then most of us would commit so many sins and fight with others for our benefits, which would make this life worse and more chaotic. Thanks to those who have given up worldly pleasures, we can constrain ourselves to be less angry, greedy and commit less sin. So, virtue, though invisible, makes this world nobler, while what can easily be seen, for example, a Ph.D. degree, money, social positions, etc. are very uncertain.

Janna