The True Realization of the World by Those with Fruitful Practice

He Qianxing: Our Sahā world is a burning house and a cesspit, and the body is also foul and impure, like a beggar's garment—covered in filth and reeking with stench. Whether male or female, young or old, handsome or beautiful, everyone is filled with excrement and urine inside, wrapped in a layer of skin on the outside, yet people cling to it with intense love. When this garment rots and breaks, they think it is death and are terrified beyond measure. Isn't taking off this tattered garment of the ordinary person and putting on the silks and satins of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas a particularly joyful thing?

Men display their careers, money, strength, and imposing physique; women preen and pose, displaying their beauty—just like holding up a vase filled with excrement and urine, showing it off vigorously, hoping to gain the approval of the opposite sex and satisfy their lustful minds and vanity. Isn't this a ridiculous thing? Those who know the vase is filled with excrement and urine would avoid it at all costs—could they still have the impulse to fight over it?

In the cultivation and realization of the Buddha-dharma, whether it is the foundational teachings or more profound ones, true understanding and comprehension must be accompanied by great changes in body and mind; it cannot be bland as water, painless and itchless. Because the manas is closely connected to the physical body, and the physical body is regulated by the manas, when the manas truly unties a knot in the mind, there will be enormous changes in body and mind—only those who genuinely practice can have personal experience of this. Because nowadays the Buddha-dharma is obtained too easily, and answers come too effortlessly, people come to believe that knowing an answer is their own wisdom, equivalent to having realized it. In fact, having actually been to Beijing and merely having read a travel guide to Beijing are two entirely different things. If you believe you understand the dharma but it is not accompanied by great changes in body and mind, then you must reflect: is your understanding based on personal experience, or is it an understanding of the dharma-meaning expounded by others? Understanding from personal experience is your own true understanding, and only then can your words and actions be consistent.

 When a knot in the mind opens, there is a feeling of lightness and release, like a tightly compressed ball of cotton loosening from its bindings. As you continuously reflect and introspect on your body-mind world, you will become aware of the arising and ceasing of your greed, hatred, delusion, arrogance, and doubt. Each time you observe a change within your mind, you will feel that afflictions have grown a bit thinner, and the body correspondingly becomes lighter and more at ease. As thoughts of greed, hatred, and delusion become fewer and fewer, until one day those afflictive thoughts basically no longer arise, body and mind will feel luminous—not a substantial light, of course, but the light of the mind, which only you yourself can feel. With each change in body and mind, you will also notice your faith in the Buddha-dharma steadily growing stronger, because it is realization through experience, not imagination of the brain. Body and mind genuinely feel that change, and that growth of faith is tangibly visible. From letting go with half-belief and half-doubt to consciously and voluntarily letting go of worldly things—all of this is because faith is growing and doubt is diminishing. Looking back at the state of living in greed, hatred, and delusion, it was as uncomfortable as soaking in poisoned water, so one voluntarily distances oneself from all that, because it is all suffering. Many, many dharma principles must be realized through one's own experience. Only when you truly face yourself will you discover that you were previously nothing short of a beast in human clothing. Now, through cultivating contemplation of the mind and introspecting on your body-mind world, virtue has greatly improved—from a beast in human clothing to having somewhat the semblance of a human being. I myself am still far from that; I have only just begun.