What Is It About Always Smelling Fragrance?

Some people who practice Buddhism diligently will now and then smell a special fragrance. One kind is a bodily fragrance: because the mind has become pure, the energy channels are unobstructed, and a fragrance arises from within the body. Another kind is an external fragrance: when heavenly beings or dharma-protecting deities follow at one's side, they bring celestial fragrance with them. If you can explain some rudimentary dharma to the people around you, heavenly beings may come to listen, and the surroundings will become very, very fragrant—this is the fragrance of heavenly beings. If you recite mantras regularly, dharma-protecting deities will follow and protect you, and the fragrance they bring is also celestial fragrance.

The fragrance of the heavenly realm does not exist in our human world; it cannot be found here. That kind of fragrance is very special: it makes one's state of mind open, clear, and joyful, making the mind pure, tranquil, and bright, and it can dispel afflictions. People with good roots of goodness will have dharma-protecting deities following and protecting them at all times, and their progress will be very rapid. If one keeps the precepts strictly, the dharma-protecting deities will also take responsibility for you, looking after you at all times, so that your afflictions lessen, your habits change, and you create more wholesome karma and no unwholesome karma.

Therefore, as long as you do your best to perform more meritorious formations (Puṇyābhisaṃskāra) and wholesome deeds, the one who benefits most is still yourself. On the surface it appears that you are doing it for others and that others are the ones who gain the benefit, but in reality the benefit you yourself gain is the greatest and the most. Many people, when given the opportunity to cultivate merit, refuse it no matter what, as if they would be at a loss; but in reality, if one is unwilling to cultivate merit and to work for others and for Buddhism, one will fail to obtain many readily available benefits—is that not truly being at a loss?

If a person's selfish mentality of thinking only of oneself does not change, no matter how great the benefit, one will not obtain it. If one only concerns oneself with not losing anything, one actually fails to gain great benefit—which is itself a loss—and in the end even the little one currently has cannot be kept or held onto. When the mind is too narrow, one's progress on the Path cannot advance. Cultivation is the emptiness of mind and selflessness; yet if all day long you cling to a selfish self and still want to cultivate selflessness, how contradictory is that? Holding onto a self while cultivating selflessness—when will you ever succeed in cultivating selflessness? You should learn to gradually let go of the self; only then can you be selfless.