Why practice meditation

My first involvement in group meditation took place in Ponsonby Library, Auckland, in a evening of April or May of 1992. The group was lead by Jim Jinmon Langabeer whose teacher was based in the Zen Mountain Manastery, New York, following the Koan tradition of Japanese Zen Buddhism. Prior to my first time involvement, I never had attended any sitting meditation. All I knew about meditation was sitting with legs crossed, closing my eyes, stopping my thoughts, and when I sit right and maintain at the right state long enough, I will be able to experience the divine feeling only the one who has achieved that level can appreciate. So that was the objective and there I was, the only Asian, sitting among the group of about 10 European Buddhists.

My objective was not achieved, and so did any other fellow sitters that night, but everyone seemed to be happier because I could see everyone smiled peacefully, acting gently, and some of them claimed the one hour session would keep them at high level of energy through the following week. I had a numb right leg that night I remembered, and it was a physical and mental challenge to my endurance of a spiritually disciplined sitting. But I also smiled; commented that was a supportive group, and I would like to join in the sitting regularly. One thing for sure that the Buddha, the teacher, who attained his Buddhahood through 7 day non-stop deep meditation. If he could, I could, at least, train my mind to be clearer, calmer and happier.

Time goes by rapidly, 19 years have entered into the history since my first sitting, yet I have not become another Buddha. Not even have I become more capable of taming my piece of mind. I realized recently that the goal is enlightenment-- a thorough and complete realization of the supreme truth and fact of the universe. According Buddhism scripture, it took innumerable eons of time to expect a sentient being’s continuous hard practice to achieve Buddhahood. To my extremely worldly way of thinking, that is an unachievable goal, why do it. My belief is it will make us keep on being traped in the non-stop cycles of birth and death from this life to the next and next for sure if we don’t follow the teachings at all; or have hope that one day the consistent practice will reward us with a happier, healthier and wealthier life, though it seems to be in the unreachable future.

In 2009, I was forwarded by a friend a link to a video clip presented by a brain researcher scientist, Dr. Jill Taylor. In the video, Dr. Taylor told the audience a story occurred 15 years ago about what had happened to her during the period of time in one morning when she experienced a major stoke. As she was an expert of human brain, she knew what exactly was happening in her left brain that was causing her feeling the ways she had never experienced before.

She firstly told the audience that a human brain is composed of two separated halves and each one of them functions totally differently -- the left one is like a serial processor of a computer, it processes data in series, meaning it checks and compares the data received just now against the data in the past, gives you result of its analysis, defines everything in detail, pulls you apart from the universe; the right half processes data in parallel-- it takes in massive of massive of data, no past or future but now only. So in that morning when the vessel of her left brain erupted and the function of that part was on and off alternately and deteriorated rapidly but gradually.

Before she managed to move herself to reach the telephone to call for help, she clearly remembered the feeling of the various periods when the left brain was partially on, she felt unbearable noise and anxiety, pushed her to be quick to take action to do this and that; but when the left brain functioning is off, she felt she was mixed in the universe, felt huge peacefulness, compassion. On the way to the hospital, she felt she was in that lovely state she thought she had found Nirvana, and if she could, everyone alive could too. At the end of her speech, she appealed that we could choose to spend more time in the circuitry of our right brain as it will help to project more peacefulness and compassion onto the world.

The part of Dr. Taylor’s speech that most motivated me is her testimony of the mind state when the left half of the brain is in silent mode. If I compare what she experienced during that morning of her stroke with the objective of practicing meditation, they are so matching. Our masters taught us to do meditation for the ultimate goal of achieving the Buddhahood which to my understanding, after I have watched Dr. Taylor’s presentation, means the unimaginable peaceful and compassionate state she experienced herself as a brain researcher.

So it makes sense to me now to practice meditation consistently. I think my neighbor will be curious about why he sees my studio light is on at the dawn time more often now.

I have silenced my flute

Early in August 2011, while browsing eBay one day, I had this idea of searching for any flute or even its parts because my flute sounded pretty airy which according to my google search was a problem of leaking pads.

I was amazed and surprised that after a few keystrokes in eBay's search box, a very long list of brand-new or used flutes is shown on the monitor of my notebook. Among them are a couple of sellers selling the velt pads at a price unbelievably cheap at about $15 including postage for a set of 16 velts. I immediately ordered one set thinking that with this money spent I would get perfect sound quality from my flute, what a good investment this action would be..

About two weeks later, the new pads arrived, and I was very excited because I anticipated a perfect flow of notes will be coming out of the flute replaced with the new pads. So I hurriedly opened the packaging; counted the number of pads received and then set out to proceed with my flute repading quest.

I have a great passion in DIY, and I am proud of having a magnificent records of fixing a lot of household items with only the most basic set of tools, and sometimes the spare parts I used in the repair are improvised. With all of the memories about my successfully repaired, household appliances, I had not any hesitation in buying a set of pads, because I was deeply immersed in the extraordinary pride from the marvelous historical records I have achieved.

While I was waiting for the arrival of the flute pads, I spend quite a lot of time browsing through the Internet for tips and the information relating to the repads of the leaking flute. With this helpful information, I found it was not difficult to disassemble all the key pads. Before long, the table was full of parts, tools and the old key pads.

After about three hours, all of the old pads were replaced by the new ones, and the parts were reassembled into a flute. By the time I was going to make test of the sound, I was nervous and was excited but never had I thought that the flute was already dead. I was shocked, completely shocked, for as soon as I blew the first mouthful of air into the mouth piece and heard nothing coming out of the flute, that was a shock mixed with some confusion. "How it is possible to be like this?" Except the B key, any other keys were totally gone.

The first thing on the next day I did was searching on the Internet about the experience I had yesterday night. Amazingly found a lot of other DIYers also had this kind of silly acts, some of them ended up sending their flutes to the hands of the professional flute technician for a rescue, costing them a fortune lot of money.

I had no choice but to take the action of repairing it by learning how others did from the website.

Up to the time of writing this post, I had only get notes of B, B-, A, G+, G, F+, F, E, D+, back. I have almost lost all my confidence in getting this damn problem successfully fixed by myself now, but my passion of playing flute is still strong. I'm wondering what my next step should head for as for the moment, my flute can only play very simple tunes with an even worse airy sound quality.

This might be the silliest thing I had ever done in my life.

Father and son

Never had I thought that my son, Chi-an, will become a musician or a guitarist one day. But he is now, and is very busy teaching people of various age groups in schools in the daytime, in the Music Education Centre after the school hours, some other students come to our home to learn from him in his studio. This picture shows the place he sets up as his guitar tuition classroom.

Chi-an's involvement in learning guitar had a dramatic story behind it. When he had just turned to eight years old, an age local schoolboy student are entitled to join in a government-funded weekend music education, I enrolled him on that program. All of the new students of that program started learning music with an easy to play instrument called recorder.

Two terms had passed and I found Chi-an was not as passionate in his daily practice at home as he was when he just joined in the program. I asked him why and he showed a boring gesture, not even looked at me, but said "I'm bored with that". "How come?", "you played quite well, don't you?". "Yes, but I have learned all of the musics of that book." He replied. 

How could that be possible? The first book meant to run for four terms. But I was curious to know if his words was true, so I asked him to play every piece of music for me. And as if he really wanted to get out of that program, he confidently and promptly picked up his recorder and played on and on till the last piece of the book. I was amazed, and I thought that I might have to consult Mrs. Rimer, chief executive officer of the music education program.

During the class break, I asked Mrs. Rimer how should I deal with this problem? Mrs. Rimer was concerned of problem that her student lost their interest in learning music. But Chi-an's cause sounded different to her. She told me that if Chi-an really could play the whole book of music, she would allow him to jump to the upper level straightaway.

So, Chi-an was summoned to present before Mrs. Rimer. He confidently played one after another without much mistakes. Mrs. Rimer could not allow him to play every single one because she was very busy, so after Chi-an had played four or five pieces, Mrs. Rimer turned to the last page of the book, and again Chi-an confidently played it to Mrs. Rimer's satisfaction. "Very good! I will inform the teacher of the second year recorder class about my decision to place Chi-an in her class right now."

That was how Chi-an jumped to a higher level of recorder class and finished the recorder class in one year. 

After that basic recorder learning, each of the music education program students was supposed to select their favorite instrument to carry on their learning according to the program. As most of other Asian parents, I tried to persuade him to learn violin or cello. But he did not like either one of these two instruments, and finally agreed to learn clarinet.

In the year that followed, he learned Clarinet quite confidently and easily. But I could not see any of his passion in the learning of this instrument. Then, before the first year of learning clarinet was to finish, he argued to quit from the music education program. His reason was simple -- he was bored of it.
In order not to let him drop out of the music education, I suggested that he could change to learn some other instrument of his favorite. And this time, he chose cello. The reason was that cello was big, and to him "big" meant cool.

So he was placed in the cello class; was given a cello by the music school and was happily carrying that big object around in the school. There were only two students in his class, Chi-an and another student, a lovely Russian girl of Chi-an's age.

Every Saturday afternoon, I drove the cello, Chi-an and grandma to the school for the one-hour lesson. And to make him happy in the learning of the cello, three of us went to KFC for lunch after the class as a reward. Even I had so many encouragement and reward to motivate his learning, yet. I could not see a sign of his passion over that instrument.

Finally, the one year cello lesson was coming to an end. He told me what really interested him was guitar, electric guitar, the guitar that plays rock and roll. Oh, dear me! His real favorite was exactly what I was fear of.

One day, while I was waiting for his class to finish in the school yard, I came across Mrs. Rimer. She smiled and asked me "how is Chenny?" I think I must have a worrying facial expression at that time, instead of greeting back to Mrs. Rimer properly, I murmured "he played cello quite well, but he told me he was really interested in guitar." Then, Mrs. Reamer replied to me in quite a stern voice "guitar is also music, what's wrong with it?". With Mrs. Rimer's challenging remark, I was sort of suddenly enlightened. My mind was more opened to the instrument that Chi-an really liked.

Not even before Chi-an's cello class was finished, he and I were found in Mainline Music buying a guitar and an amplifier. This time, I really saw his passion of the guitar music.

In the long journey in supporting his pursuit of learning his favorite instrument, I had never thought that one day he would make guitar tuition his career. About eight years from the day he got his first guitar, he was employed by the Music Education Centre as a guitar teacher during his second year in the University on a part-time basis.

As of the time I'm writing this blog about his career, he has been teaching guitar full time just over one whole year. From the stories of his interactivity with the students and his steady growth of popularity reflected from his the enrollment and retention figures, I know he is on the right path of his career.

I'm now really relieved in seeing both my children are being active and passionate on their jobs. All I need to do now is to be their spiritual support and to concentrate more In the Amituofo chanting.

The meaning of life

A fellow Buddhist, recently told me that her son spoke to her with illogical statements and showed some symptoms that stunned her very much. I knew straight away that was schizophrenia because I happened to have just watched a video not long ago about this disease. I felt very sorry for this mother because I also knew from her that her son was very obedient and supportive to her. Every week on the payday, her son would be just automatically giving his total earning of that week to the mother, and then only spent whatever amount mother put into his wallet. So I could appreciate how sorrowful and helpless my friend must be. I am so sorry for her.

Two months ago, my ex-colleague called me out of my expectation. From the conversation, I could tell his mood was quite low. After a few exchanges of pleasantry and our personal updates, he inserted this shocking news. "Shirley has just passed away." I could not believe what I had heard. I yelled "what!!! Who has passed away?" He replied, "Shirley, my wife."

Shirley was a kind, friendly, and generous woman. Every time when we were invited to their home, she always took the best food or delicacy from the fridge to treat us, and also tried to pack something up for us to take home when we were leaving. Two months before her demise, I had my last phone chat with her, and I could not believe she had any health problem. "What was the cause of her death?" I asked my ex-colleague. "hepatitis"

I think that is why whenever I recount these two episodes happened on my friends, I always agree with the quote that most of the Buddhists are familiar with-- "life is impermanent." (人生無常).

Probably for this reason, I intended to practice my English writing on the topic of "the meaning of life." As usual, I began this process by asking my wife some questions about this topic the other day. Without any hesitation, she answered: "Life is to get ourselves to be prepared for our soul to transmigrate to the blissful pure land". She answered in a way like she was being quizzed by the master. She is a devoted follower of the Mahayana Buddhism of pure land tradition, so I understood what she meant, but that was not the type of answer that I expected. So I pressed on "put your religion belief aside, and tell me frankly what you feel about the meaning of life." "Then, I think the meaning of life is enjoying what you have contentedly and happily." I reckoned she was giving an honest answer.

Then I asked many other friends of the same question. And I found all of the answers I collected were more or less different from each other.Everyone is an unique individual I also checked for the definition of life on the Web by Google search and found there were innumerable collection of quotes, and finally I landed on the page of Wikipedia about this topic, and I found Wikipedia provides the most thorough information. It gives summarized thoughts of the major religions, ideologies, regions of the globe, academic advocates.

I asked myself the same question, and I found it was not so easy to just give an answer that matches every aspect of my thoughts, my philosophy, my personality and my belief. Having checked throughout the archive in my brain, it came up with one like this -- "life is for us to fulfill what we are destined to accomplish."

To conclude this post, I would like to quote "life is to settle the issues which your Karma casts upon you." (人生酬業)

Indeed we are born to accept either punishment or reward that are recorded accurately in our Karma. And in the process of accepting punishment or reward, all sorts of experiential viewpoint are naturally expressed according to the Karma.

On fatalism

One of my previously written post titled "destined fortune" states that the prominent naval minister of Qhing Dynasty put this remark on his tomb stone "belief in destined fortune and not in the acquired knowledge". My personal perception about his statement carved on his tomb stone is apparently telling the world that we have nothing to be proud of because anything profound that you think you have achieved is actually the result of your destined fortune. And so I have taken Mr. Zeng as my comrade in terms of the same view point about life -- fatalism.

To me, fatalism means a belief that whatever you do to prevent something from happening, or to make something to be materialized, whatever is resulted is the one you have to just accept no matter whether you really want or hate it.

There are many popular sayings we are familiar with in our everyday living, such as, "whatever will be will be"; all these sayings reflect the mindset is ruled by the belief of fatalism.

But you should never raise this topic in any discussion group and simply allege that you believe in fatalism lest you will be despised as a coward, not manly, useless guy. And whoever criticizes you always has powerful and magnificent theory to support them, and all these critics will humiliate you. The reason is simply because you are not as successful, prominent and high up there as Mr. Zeng.

But my advice does not apply to Mr. Zeng, because he was so successful; He was in the top ranking in the country being a naval minister. Many people say that Mr. Zeng was only showing his humble manner to the world by saying "believe in destined fortune and not in the acquired knowledge", and they believe all of his accomplishment Mr. Zeng has achieved are the result of his effort. And I believe just differently from this because if the reason he said so was just because of his humbleness, then he didn't have to carve it on the tomb stone. Anything that is carved on the tomb stone is a serious belief the dead deeply believed during his lifetime.

Although I believe in fatalism, I still work hard and live every of my days seriously, and not indulge myself in anything that and corrupts me. Because I have a belief extension, causality.

From the appearance, causality is somewhat in conflict with fatalism. Because the causality believes that everything and anything does not happen from nowhere; they believe whatever has emerged can be traced back to the very origin of the cause, just like the simile of "harvest cucumber because the cucumber seeds are buried; harvest bean because bean seeds are planted

Learning Google spreadsheet part 2

There is a saying that life means uninterrupted learning. As far as my personal learning experience is concerned, besides my learning activities during my schooling time, the one I have learned wholeheartedly and persistently is Google spreadsheet.

I have written a post previously about how I got involved in the learning of this application provided by Google for free to the mass public. As of the time I am writing this post as the part two of this series, I feel that my passion for a further learning of this subject is still very high. It is so high that since I have started learning and practicing on this software eight months ago, the time and energy I spend on the learning, contemplating and experimenting of an actual system I made from scratch for my son to use on his music teaching business is still increasing. Sometimes I think that I have taken it as an entertainment. Sometimes I feel that I have become addicted to the learning process of this application. What has made me become so deeply absorbed?

My perception of the software that is called spreadsheet is that it is a very powerful information managing tool. With this tool you can tailor-make all of the formulas suitable to your peculiar need and insert them in any specified array of cells, and it will sort out all the data in the corresponding columns and rows. To learn some basic formulas such as the combination of the Google code, we have to be very patient at the beginning stage of the learning. Take the system I constructed for Chenny as an example. At first, I aimed to make a timetable that shows all the classes in a week; a student profile that records all the contact details, their class time, fee to charge; and a class log for him to enter the payment, lesson delivered, and the account balance. First of all I have to work out a formula which is able to import data from the timetable Chenny is using every day. The student name on Chenny's timetable will go to the student sheet to look for the name of a peculiar student, once it is located, the weekday and lessen time allocated to that student on Chenny's timetable will be displayed in the right columns and rows.

It sounds very easy and simple, but you have to learn to use the language that Google spreadsheet can understand, and then you have to be able to write a correct formula and embed it in the target cell. When these two conditions are met, the data supposed to fill up that cell will pop on when you press the 'enter' key. Once you have all these done, the program will automatically fill up the timetable with the student names on each of the correct positions.

The longest the I have ever written could be this one:

=iferror(FILTER(transpose(TimeTable!$A$1:$H$1),search($B49,transpose(TimeTable!$A$2:$H$2&

TimeTable!$A$3:$H$3&TimeTable!$A$4:$H$4&TimeTable!$A$5:$H$5&TimeTable!$A$6:$H$6&

TimeTable!$A$7:$H$7&TimeTable!$A$8:$H$8&TimeTable!$A$9:$H$9&TimeTable!$A$10:$H$10&

TimeTable!$A$11:$H$11&TimeTable!$A$12:$H$12&TimeTable!$A$13:$H$13&TimeTable!$A$14:$H$14&

TimeTable!$A$15:$H$15&TimeTable!$A$16:$H$16&TimeTable!$A$17:$H$17&TimeTable!$A$18:$H$18&

TimeTable!$A$19:$H$19&TimeTable!$A$20:$H$20&TimeTable!$A$21:$H$21&TimeTable!$A$22:$H$22&

TimeTable!$A$23:$H$23&TimeTable!$A$24:$H$24&TimeTable!$A$25:$H$25&TimeTable!$A$26:$H$26&

TimeTable!$A$27:$H$27&TimeTable!$A$28:$H$28))),"")

And a few short ones:

=SUM(E4:P4)

=$J14*2

=query(index(ARRAYFORMULA('Lesson log'!$A$1:$M1)), "select Col1, Col2, Col3, Col4, Col5, Col6, Col7, Col8, Col9, Col10, Col12")

With all of these formulas working together, they produced reports and graphs like the screenshots shown above:

I said that I seem to have become addicted to writing formulas, and it is quite true. Because during this eight months of time, besides the fixed daily activities such as having a tea break; time for meals; sitting meditation and spiritual practice, every bit of the free time I have are spent in the contemplating, writing, modifying and fixing the formulas.

Fellow Buddhists I know advised me quite often that people of my age should be concentrated in the spiritual practice so as to achieve a peaceful and blissful ending of our life. Engaging in the worldly pursuit may end up with our stronger sticking to our sensual pleasure and is a great obstacle to the most important life objective – Nivana. This is true. And so, I have promised to make some adjustment of my daily living schedule from next week.

On destined fortune

This link leads to a listing of web pages containing a statement the honorable Minister of Qing Empire, Zeng Guo Fan, once said: "... believe in the destined fortune and not the acquired knowledge...(信運氣﹐不信書)". My understanding of his statement is that he believes that any of our achievement manifests by our destined fortune and not just simply from careful planning and persistent effort. He must have made this conclusion from all of his life experience.

I also agree with some other bloggers' view point of this quote. Some said that Zeng's statement was just a reflection of his characteristic of being humble and modest. while some said that instead of emphasizing his accomplishments were the result of his intelligence and hard working, he attributed all of the abundant fruition to the manifestation of his good luck. However, I personally believe that either of the aforesaid point of view shares only 30% of the truth, There is this thing labeled as Karma which is similar to the notion of fortune moving all the trivial and major incidents of our life around, and that force takes up 70% or even more of the end result.

What triggered my intent of writing on this topic was from a chat with my wife this morning. "Jean, Chi-an (our son), started his first class at 9 am, he is teaching those school boys in the school now," I continued, "how lucky he is to get a good jobuch as this." Jean replied,"yeah, two months ago, we were still worried about his job issue, and suddenly the changes brought up this happy opportunity." she said while doing the laundry. "This reminded me of a remark the honorable scholar and government minister of Qing Dynasty, Zeng Guo Fan, once said '...believe in the destined fortune and not the acquired knowledge...'" I said, "I am going to write a blog about my perception of his famous remark."

May 2 of 2011 marked the day my son started his involvement in the music education in a state run college and another five primary schools and intermediate schools. A few days earlier, he was required to be interviewed by the head of the school's music department and the principal to make sure he was the right one they wanted to recruit to train the four rock bands of the school.

The interview went well and Chi-an was formerly employed by that college. His first class will be on May 5. With this guitar tuition in the state schools plus his other two sectors of practices, his work day hours are reasonably fully booked, and so his income is expected to be sustainable. All that had happened to result in this reality to come true were so unbelievably played one after another, just as dramatic as a playwright containing the various parts of longing , anxious, frustrated, nervous, exciting, disappointing, and all sorts of feelings you name it. Fortunately the desired and expected ending turns out to be a happy one. And now I am, as the father, is noting down the bits and pieces of thoughts with regard to this remarkable episode of Chen family.

Resume my role as a telephone counselor

I had once been a telephone counselor since 1994. That was a voluntary job helping the Chinese speaking residents of Auckland when they are in need of someone to talk about their difficult situation. It was a part-time voluntary job which I contributed six hours per month in the evening sitting and waiting for calls in the telephone room. That job lasted for about 10 years till October 2005 when my Parkinson's disease disabled me from driving.

Although I had stopped serving as a telephone counselor since then, I have been playing this role now and then in the past five years. What motivated me to write this blog was due to my latest experience in helping my family friends going through their problems, and that two cases brought the memory of that 10 years working as a volunteer up my mind screen.

I was browsing on the Internet in the morning of last Friday, the phone rang and I answered it. It was from our family friend. Her tone was frustrated, bit angry and anxious, instantly I knew she must be having some problems and I should provide whatever assistance to help her out. Naturally I had gone through the basic steps of telephone counseling skills with her. And it was a satisfactory one because later in that evening she rang to thank my help as her problems had been solved and she was happy again.

The next day, I received yet another request for counseling from my friend Mr. X his problem was sent to me by text message through mobile. The message reflected anxiety and depressing sort of feelings. I texted back saying that I would reply his message by e-mail as it got to be a lot lengthy. Then we both found that even a long e-mail could not touch the core of the problem, so we arranged a telephone conversation.

Mr. X's case was done in the evening of the next day. It comprised of three seperate contacts by three means of e-mail, telephone and mobile devise.

In the telephone session, I mapped up the whole picture and empathized him, and by the end of the process, I heard the tone of his speech turned from depressing and anxious into calm and hopeful. He commented on my e-mail that I sent to him earlier as having pin-pointed something that was troubling him.

In my diary that noted my recent telephone counselling experience, I could not surpress the joy of my heart and have thus typped to conclude the episode I played in. "... I was affected with my routine, and the tremor becomes bit more rigorous, however, the feeling of being helpful is nice."

My perception of spiritual practice

In the past few years, Internet has become very popular and advanced enormously, e-mail users often send interesting or useful information to share with each other. I noticed that this trend began increasing sharply in 2000, sometimes I receive this kind of forwarding from friends whom I haven't got a chance to meet them in person, and the number of this kind of forwarding can be over 20 or more in one day. Among these articles, over 50% of them are topics relevant to the maintenance of our physical health.

I wonder if there is anyone censoring and ranking the most popular topics being shared on the Web, if there is one, I believe the results will show that most of the Internet users are careful about their health of the physical aspect, as to the mental health part, it is very seldom mentioned.

As far as I can remember, people living in the small town where I was born in Taiwan, "mental health" was rarely heard of before 1960 in spite of the fact that there were insane people wandering on the streets in those days. As humans civilization progress, people began to acknowledge the importance of mental health; began to address the need of both physical and mental health. So we saw and noticed a rapid growth of the mental health service and heard of the terms such as depression, anxiety, anorexia, counsellor, psychologist. and so on.

I personally agree that if people are healthy in both mental and physical aspects, then they are really healthy people. But Buddha, Jesus, and everyone of the awakened or enlightened beings who had once lived on this planet with us, the ordinary beings, told us that we are the ignorant, sinners, wanders, strayed lambs, the unawakened. All these labels point out a fact that to the standard of the awakened sages, we are just like a patient, a sick fellow, a pitiable one, so we are not healthy at all to their viewpoint. And I believe the qualities we lack of are in the spiritual area within us. So the spiritual part of our life has been neglected or is denied of its importance.

To my understanding of Buddha's teaching, the motivation that made him spend 49 years of his life was that he wanted to share the ultimate bliss he achieved and experienced through his practice. Although he had tried his best to explain and describe what we should look for, only a few of his students understood and attained the fruition of their practice. He knew that only through diligent practice can anyone achieve that goal and realize what he had tried to teach, yet he still tried to depict what the final goal was all about, and left innumerable volumes of his teaching in a great deal of diversified methods after his demise.

What is that unspeakable goal he pursued before his enlightenment?

"The self." The self is the ultimate center wrapped by layer and layer of contamination in our mind such as: ignorance, desire, selfish, anger, and etc. Sometimes Buddha refers "the self" to "the other shore" or "the pure land" or "the Western blissful world" or "Nivana".

Although the nature of "the self" is unexplainable and unimaginable using our language, some attempts were still made to describe it. The most popular one is that the nature of the self is emptiness, albeit this one may easily mislead to a mind picture like the vast outer space looking very bleak, lonely, cold and all sort of unwelcoming qualities. I personally like the one presented by the sixth patriarch Huineng upon his enlightenment, he said, "何期自性本自清净，何期自性本不生灭，何期自性本自具足，何期自性本无动摇，何期自性能生万法"( never had I expected that the self is purely clean; never had I expected that the self is beyond birth and demise; never had I expected that the self is completely sustained; never had I expected that the self is unshakable; never had I expected that the self produces limitless beings).

The reason that we should start our spiritual practice as early and diligently as possible is that life reincarnates. After we die, we don't know and we cannot control where will we be born; who will be our parents; and this reincarnation has no end, it just repeats and repeats till one day when we finally awaken and achieve Nivana.

Now, we realize the necessity and importance of doing spiritual practice so as to achieve that wonderful goal Buddha has pointed out for us, how should we start with?

My advice is to look for recommendation from your networking a genuine and non-cult Buddhism learning group, or browsing through the webpages created by Buddhist group, and find one that you prefer the most, and then visit them and join their regular activities. You will gain the basic knowledge about Buddhism from there. And the next step is to study the basic scripts recommended by your group. And lastly and the most important step is to observe what Buddha taught.

What benefit will you attain from your diligent practice? You will feel more peaceful because the layers of contamination wrapping up "the self" are gradually peeled off, and eventually you will be enlightened and permanently stay away from the hopeless reincarnation.

So let us learn and practice the spiritual before it is too late.

My 60th birthday - part 2

The day of 25th of February came and went quietly and swiftly. That was the one marking the birthday of mine and my wife's.

Prior to its arrival, Chenny asked us whether if we would like to have a lunch as our 60th birthday celebration in the restaurant or at home. I knew he cared about making a good one for us, I was very pleased to feel his caring thoughts. I said "I prefer to have a simple one at home rather than a big one at a restaurant." "just buy a pack of chips, one stir-fried Rice, one sweet-sour pork from the take-away", added mom.

Young people tend to look birthday party as a very important event. They celebrate their birthdays for each other, so if one has a group of close friends more than 12 then he will be very likely to be invited to a birthday party almost every month through out a year, and they take it as a must-attend occassion. So I appreciate how Chenny felt and cared about our birthday celebration, particularly this 60th one.

As was discussed by us, Chenny called the take-away shop and placed the order. At 6:45 pm that evening, Chenny set out the three dishes on the table plus four glasses of beer.

Jean and I were so happy. Birthday song was sung; wishes were made; photos were shot; the party foods were entirely consumed, and finally had our profound 60th birthday party completed.

I am aware of the truth that I belong to the 60 age group from now on.

My 60th birthday - part 1

I am turning to 60 years old when the calendar comes to the 25th of February. It is approaching soon. I should be excitedly looking forward to it; I must have worked out a plan of travelling with Jean in a cruise tour visiting popular destinations in the world. But I know it will just be another ordinary day filling up with routine activities--morning practice, check e-mails, shift dog to do his watch duty on the deck, reading, medication and meditation etc..

But, it is a 60th birthday, as the majority of the 60 year old fellows do, I should be entitled to do something special and joyful to spoil myself and celebrate it. After all, it only comes once in our life...!@#$%%.... What a good and justified excuse!

In my parents' days, a few particular birthdays of the family members' or their close relations' are just can not be omitted. The 6th birthday, the 16th, the 30th, and the 60th, and even the 80th if you live long enough. On these particular birthdays, to some well off family, a feast will be held, and close family friends and relatives will be invited to attend. As to ordinary families, a rather special food such as glutenous cake made in the shape of turtle and dyed in red symbolizing longevity will be offered to the ancestors and Buddha with a simple worship service held in front of the family shrine altar.

So far I did not skip any of the above mentioned peculiar birthdays of mine except the 60th and the 80th ones because they aren't due yet.

I remember my parents undertook a very costly celebration on my 6th birthday--dedicated to the heavenly deities by offering a whole male pig. I still vividly remember I was awaken from sound sleep by my mother before dawn. It was still dark in a cold but clear morning. The twinkling stars were still in the clear sky. Mother took me to the make-shift altar setup by the road side in front of our home. Before me was the corpse of a poor pig, supposed to be male as tradition required. The pig was displayed on a specially constructed wooden frame; its mouth was pulled open and an orange inserted in its mouth; its eyes shut but looked like smiling, the whole body on the frame with head up and tail end down in a 30 degrees elevation.

Mother held my two palms together with a burning incense held in between my palms. She stooped down, holding my hands together with the incense and said the prayer on behalf of me. As I can remember, the prayer went like this, "ah! the heavenly deities and the most revered heavenly emperor, we are so grateful to your constant protecting over Ah-sium (this was how I was called in Taiwanese dialect) that he has turned 6 years old today. Your continuing protecting and blessing him through the rest of his life is sincerely implored." Then, I think, I went straight back to bed after that ritual.

Then my 16th birthday. 1967 was the year, and I was in my first school term of senior high school. A same service was held; a poor male pig was slaughtered for the sake of my 16th birthday. I ever asked my mother why this kind of costly event had to be held? She said, "we do this to thank the heavenly deities." As I grew older, I understood the reasons: a son is important to a family as he is supposed to carry the linage of this family on; I was the only son survived after my two preceding brothers died in their infanthood, my parents were just too scared of the loss of me and therefore seek for blessing through the folk belief such as this; 16th birthday marks the critically important stage of life in terms of reproductivity, a stage of being able to fulfill the mission soon.

Time flied by. I married at age 26. I remember once before I was turning 30, my mother mentioned about who is supposed to be responsible for the celebration of my 30th birthday. She told me that according the customary, a son-in-law's 30th birthday celebration was at the cost of the wife's maiden home. I cannot remember now whether I had mentioned about the 30th birthday celebration to my wife and she passed the words on to her maiden home, or my father-in-law just knew about the etiquette, anyway, we were asked to travel to my wife's maiden home in Tainan on my birthday one day. I was not aware of the arrangement that my father-in-law had planned prior to our arrival.

After we arrived home, settled and were ready to dinner, my father-in-law summoned everyone to be in the living room, and seated me in the center of the couch and presented a short speech. I could not remember the speech he presented, but it was generally like this: "today is your 30th birthday", he continued "mom and dad wish you healthy, happy and lucky throughout the rest of your life. Offered to you is a bowl of wheat flour noodle with egg and a pan of homemade birthday cake that symbolize long life and everlasting descendants. Here you go."

Then I started my devouring of the whole bowl of the food under the surveillance of the whole family and got my 30th birthday celebration done without having to slaughter a pig.

Now, the 60th birthday is coming toward me. Time flies even faster than I imagine. I am here in New Zealand; have become a Buddhist of the Pure Land path.. What the birthday celebration of this important one will be like? I don't know. But I am definitely sure for one thing, that no pig will be sacrificed for the sake of my 60th birthday. Who will be responsible for this important event? I think it will be my wife, and she will make a bowl of wheat flour noodle with boiled egg for me, and presents a short speech which will be "Amituofo!"

An even more important one that follows the 60th one will be of the 80th birthday which I don't think will be held for me on the planet but in the pure land hopefully.

Delivering Happiness

A few days ago, a friend forwarded to me a story titled "the shoe king. "Shoe King"? never heard of that, but I was curious about this very special title, so I read on.

It was a story about a computer genius Tony Hsie, a Taiwanese-American, aged 36, CEO of Zappos, the biggest shoe retailer on the Internet. I read on. His parents were from Taiwan, both graduated from Taiwan University, the top university in Taiwan. He was born in America. He was very smart especially on computer programming that when he was still at the primary school at the age of 9, he was already creating advanced programs.

At age 19, he won the championship in the world programming competition when he just graduated from Howard University, consequently, his outstanding ability attracted Microsoft's attention that the top figures of Microsoft flew to Boston from Seattle trying to invite him to be working for Bill Gates but he declined. He was more interested in building his own business that was full of the culture of his taste.

He started his business of worm farm at the age of 9 when he was still in primary school; did post shopping on stamps trade at age 12, both earned him approximately $6000 per month. During his high school days, he ran campus magazine and the revenue from advertisement earned US$200 per month for him. During his time in Howard, he rented a discarded dormitory and turned it into a Pizza restaurant.

As I read on the quite lengthy article, I extolled his achievements, particularly his spiritual aspects. The article reported that Tony's approach to money was very unusual comparing to the majority of entrepreneurs. Once he was interviewed by a program conductor. At a stage, their conversion came up to business and money issues, the program host threw a few questions related to profit, money and etc.. Tony began to become bored with the interview; he responded to the questions with short sentences and was lacking enthusiastic tone. The interviewer noticed this unique trait of his, rapidly changed the topics to his philosophy applied to his investment in business,

While almost all the businesses in the world pursue profit by reducing company spending, cutting off idling positions, Tony seems to be doing opposite way. He set many policies, such as free freight to the orders; three pairs of shoe were sent for you to choose the most preferred one and return the unwanted; No restriction on his call center staff with the time spent in conversation over the phone. The canteen of his company provides free food and drinks to the employees. He said he believed when a company had its culture that made both his customers and employees happy, then the culture will naturally develop toward prosperity.

He published a book titled "Delivering Happiness" during the end part of last year.I haven't got a chance to read it yet. But from the book reviews posted on the web, I know it covers his almost legendary business activities and what each of them had taught or inspired him.

I also watched the video which he lectured recently. It is a 85 minute long video from which I saw a matured young man. in a casual clothes, crew cut hair, serious facial expression, eloquently presenting his view, his thoughts of business, philosophy. What a decent, superior, humble and successful young man. As he is related to Taiwan-- a small country but has directly or indirectly produced eminent people like Tony, and this makes me proud of being from Taiwan too.

After I have listened Tony's speech the other day. I was impressed by the part about his call center in Zappos. He said that he asked his staff to be the caller's friend and make them happy, thus he did not set limit on time spent on any single case. I was skeptical about this instruction he gave to his call center staff. My personal experience in calling to any customer service of company impresses me that all the customer service teams are asked or are trained to minimize the talking time in their daily work. They try to get rid of you from the line when they think your question is answered; their tones are normally cold or even harsh. But Tony said the longest duration of talking with a customer recorded was over six hours, I could not believe, though I trust him. So I made a call to Zappos on the same day after I watched that video.

"Hi, there, I am calling from New Zealand" I said with mad tremor on my hands. "yes, what can I help you?" I honestly told him that I called for the reason of experiencing the so called Zappos culture by myself. "I heard from your boss that you don't set limit on the talking time with customer and that your longest single talking time was over 6 hours.". He said. "you are right. my longest record is one hour. but our longest record is not just 6 hours, that one is in the history now, and the longest record is over 8 hours."

I didn't talk with that call center over even 5 minutes, because I am not talkative and I don't mean to waste their time.

Tony is so successful in business. His business managing philosophy is so unique. But I believe whoever buys Zappos might go bankrupt soon if they copy whatever Tony does because there must be other factors involve in the overall business operation that is not possible to analyse by the worldly knowledge.