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.