Yielding like the earth,
Joyous and clear like the lake,
Still as the stone at the door,
He is free from life and death.
His thoughts are still.
His words are still.
His work is stillness.
He sees his freedom and he is freed.
The master surrenders his beliefs.
He sees his freedom and he is freed.
The master surrenders his beliefs.
He sees beyond the end and the beginning.
He cuts all ties.
He gives up all his desires.
He resists all temptation.
And he rises.
~The Dhammapada
Improves vision
Helps fight cancer
Maintaining blood health
Reduces risk of heart disease
Good for digestion
Walking upon this path you will make an end of suffering. Having discovered how to pull out the thorn of lust, I make known the path. You yourselves must strive; the Buddhas only point the way. Those meditative ones who tread the path are released from the bonds of Mara. All conditioned things are impermanent — when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering. This is the path to purification. ~Dhammapada
Joy, the Pali word sukkha (Sanskrit su-kha) is usually translated as happiness. As the opposite of duhkha, however, it connotes the end of all suffering, a state of being that is not subject to the ups and downs of change – that is, abiding joy. It would be difficult to find a more thoroughly researched definition of joy than the Buddha’s. If we can trust that at least the outline of truth remains in the legends of his life, then his questionings just before going forth to the Four Noble Sights were chiefly concerned with the search for absolute joy. What anyone could want of worldly happiness, Prince Siddhartha surely had, with the promise of much more. But the young prince scrutinized the content of worldly happiness much more closely than the rest of us, and his conclusion was that what people called joy was a house of cards perched precariously on certain preconditions. When these preconditions are fulfilled, the pleasure we feel lasts but a moment, for the nature of human experience is to change. And when they are not fulfilled, there is longing and a frustratingly elusive sense of loss; we grasp for what we do not have and nurse the gnawing desire to have it again. To try to hold on to anything – a thing, a person, an event, a position – merely exposes us to its loss. Anything that changes, the Buddha concluded, anything in our experience that consists of or is conditioned by component sensations – the Buddha’s word was samskaras – produces sorrow, not joy. Experience promises happiness, but it delivers only.
~Anonymous, The Dhammapada
Once upon a time there was a rich village. The wealthiest of the villagers decided to hide a huge lump of gold to protect it from bandits and robbers. So he buried it in a nearby rice field.
Many years later, the village was no longer rich, and the rice field was abandoned and unused. A poor farmer decided to plow the field. After some time plowing, it just so happened that his plow struck the long forgotten buried treasure.
At first he thought it must be a very hard tree root. But when he uncovered it, he saw that it was beautiful shining gold. Since it was daytime he was afraid to try and take it with him. So he covered it up again and waited for nightfall.
The poor farmer returned in the middle of the night. Again he uncovered the golden treasure. He tried to lift it, but it was far too heavy. He tied ropes around it and tried to drag it. But it was so huge he couldn’t budge it an inch. He became frustrated, thinking he was lucky to find a treasure, and unlucky to not be able to take it with him. He even tried kicking the huge lump of gold. But again it wouldn’t budge an inch!
Then he sat down and began to consider the situation. He decided the only thing to do was to break the lump of gold into four smaller lumps. Then he could carry home one piece at a time.
He thought, “One lump I will use for ordinary day-to-day living. The second lump I will save for a rainy day. The third lump I will invest in my farming business. And I will gain merit with the fourth lump by giving it to the poor and needy and for other good works.”
With a calm mind he divided the huge lump of gold into these four smaller lumps. Then it was easy to carry them home on four separate trips.
Afterwards he lived happily.
The moral is: “Don’t bite off more than you can chew.”