Disciple: Master, I feel exhausted to the extreme, not even up to take a breath. How I just want to quit the job to practice cultivation with you at the Flying-to-the-sky Cave.
Master: It all comes from your mind. You feel tired becuas you take illusion as truth.
Diciple: I am thinking what kind of test on me it is this time. I don’t quite know how to tell the false from the true. If all is false, is my feeling exhausted false too?
Master: Every manifestation in the world is false. You will be afflicted if you take it as true.
Disciple: But at least I need to make ends meet and a living. In fact we don’t really need to be that rich if it is just to survive. I just don’t feel up to it physically once I am at work.
Master: You are taking it as true even if you are doing it casually or perfunctorily.
Disciple: What shall I do, Master?
Master: Do your best on it, but do not have your mind turned by the external states. Refrain from getting joyful when you make it, nor disappointed when you fail to.
Disciple: I don’t seem to feel tired mentally. I feel exhausted physically.
Master: The physical strength is subject to the influence of the mind. We are quite busy here at the Fly-to-the-sky Cave these days. They feel tired if they take what they do as a task, and do it without any passion. I don’t feel tired at all, but it is great fun to me. It is so because I never take it as a job. Exhuastion is non-existent if we leave behind the Self. Keep reciting the sutra.
Disciple: It is indeed thought-provoking a remark! Yes, as long as we do not feel tired mentally, we won’t noice how it is phsyically.
Master: You are too learned. It is difficult to enter the state of no-learning. Take time to appreciate what I just said.
Disciple: I have been reading the Sutra of Longevity for sometime. I feel what is the most useful to me is not the mantra, but the Twelve Conditioned Links of Caustion.
Master: Do not be engage in intellectual conjecture. You need to be able to read between the lines.
Disciple: That is the area where I am the weakest. Anyway, I will work on it. I feel better and less exhuasted now.
Master: The better educated one is, the more one is hindered by literary marks.
Disciple: Yes. This is a process of returning to zero.
Master: I had the same problem when I was a new culitvator of the Buddha Dharma, untile later I realized that the knowledge I had acquired was the biggest obstacle for me. I then learnt to put it down.
Disciple: Yes, as what you told us at the beginning to read it as if we were stupid, and in stupidity, one gets enlightened.
Master: Make you someone who do not think or ask why, but act as the mind wants you to do. Well…before you know it, you can read and understand the Buddhist scripture.
Disciple: Yes, Master. I am just preoccpuied by too much thining. I get exhausted because of it, too. Master, I did not like it when people said I got sick because of the mind. I just feel tired all day long. I used to think that you have never been tired like me and therefore do not know how it feels. But I now understand why. Perhaps it is true that I am tired physically, but I would not have felt it if I were able to ignore the physical exsitence of my body.
Master: Yes. Work on your mind. The disease shall have nothing to rely on and disappear.
Disciple: Do you mean I won’t feel tired if my mind is released from the body?
Master: Why do we feel it difficult? It is so because of our body.
Disciple: Thank you, Master. I learnt a lot today. Indeed big progress. My mind was so bound by my body.
Master: You took the false as true, and the objective and the subjective.
Disciple: I get your point, Master. Well, not sure whether the point I get is the one you want me to know. : ) Feeling exchausted and my physical body are the objective. My mind was bound by the physical exhuastion. As a result, the body takes hold as the subjective.
Master: The body is the objective, and the mind is the subjective.
Disciple: Master, I got engaged in sales almost the same time when I started to learn the Buddha Dharma. I found the two fundalmentally the same. Both require us to put down the knowledge we have previously acquired and start from zero. Both aim to provide happiness to others. Both take culitvation. Both aim to help people get rid of their pain and afflictions.
Master: You shall be a person of the superior grade if you can make it just to do it without giving rise to any thought.
Disciple: I will try to make it to reach such a grade. However, aren’t we taking it seriously if we try it, Master?
Master: Applying efforts to it is a process of culitvation. Taking it seriously finds its roots in your mind.
Disciple: Thank you, Master. You are so great! We do make rapid progress by talking to Master.
Master: : ) I am not great. It is that I have entered the real mark. There isn’t any hinderance before me. Whatever questions you have for me, I will answer them. But if there are people making nonsense, I shall only say “Amitabha-Buddha”. Those making troubles deliberately receive no response from me. I remain silent before them.
Disciple: I now know what my goal is. Often I hear people talk about becoming a Buddha. I don’t want to be a Buddha. I just want to be a good man, someone who does her best to make it, without giving rise to any thoughts. Thank you, Master.
Master: Become such a person, and you are a Buddha. It takes sincerity and honesty to be such a person.
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