For those who have cultivated bodhicitta, the heart naturally becomes filled with love and forbearance. When such a presence radiates from a person, their actions will naturally cease to harm others. Unless one deliberately assumes the role of a “demon king” in order to test others and create adverse conditions that become supportive circumstances for practice, there will be no intentional harm at all. As a result, the relationships around such a person naturally become harmonious—just as when fragrance fills the air, bees will naturally gather where the scent is found.
However, a true bodhisattva does not seek smooth or pleasing interpersonal relationships.
Why do we pursue harmonious interpersonal relationships? Ultimately, it is still self-grasping (ātma-grāha) at work. First, there is the fear of and aversion to loneliness; second, there is the attempt to expand one’s sense of power and security through identification with a group. As we discussed when studying worldview: individuals define themselves through the groups to which they belong. When a person is situated within a corresponding collective, they more easily experience feelings of security, dignity, and even sublimity.
Take an ordinary example from daily life: when ten girls go out shopping together, the sense of individual risk is dispersed, and their feeling of safety increases significantly. But when a girl goes out alone—especially to an unfamiliar place surrounded by strangers—her sense of vigilance immediately arises.
Therefore, if we trace our various demands regarding relationships back to their root, they are all extensions of self-grasping: using relationships to avoid loneliness, groups to magnify the self, and using numbers to manufacture a sense of security.
But as practitioners, we must turn inward and reflect: the purpose of this life is for spiritual practice, not merely for gathering with others for amusement.
Many of the Dharma brothers and sisters here are already in their thirties, forties, or fifties—well past the age of mere playfulness. By thirty, you are already like a cooling dish left on the table—the best moment has already passed. By forty, you are completely dried up and stale. By fifty, you are no longer even a dish fit to be served at the table. Shouldn’t you hurry up and practice? After enough time passes, what meaning is really left in this world? In the end, all that awaits is being placed into a small wooden urn and buried underground.
Yet we are extraordinarily skilled at pushing the fact “I will die” to the far edges of our awareness, allowing ourselves to continue living as usual—scrolling through our phones, chatting, complaining, and planning for an uncertain future. We constantly divert our attention away from death, whereas spiritual practice is precisely about turning that attention back.
Why do I keep repeating these “complaints”? Because this issue is genuinely serious. Yet I have also begun to notice another problem: when something is said too many times, it gradually loses its effect. The first time one hears about impermanence (anitya), the heart may tremble slightly; by the tenth time, one merely nods; by the fiftieth time, it has become nothing more than ordinary background noise.
Even so, responsibility for one’s life must ultimately return to oneself. Spiritual practice is one’s own affair, just as no one else can breathe on your behalf. No matter how many teachings one hears, if they do not truly enter the heart, they remain nothing more than concepts—mere information.
This article is a preliminary translation draft and has not yet been reviewed or proofread by the speaker.
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