https://soundcloud.com/tim-fairweather-1/3-types-of-bodhisattva-kindness
This book from Pure Name Buddha teaches thirty different types of kindness without ego. Another book teaches a thousand, and they are just examples. If you want to make your kindness power a hundred per cent pure, you can spend your whole life learning about kindness. We won’t try to learn thirty types today, just three.
Spiritual Kindness and Human Kindness are different. The human idea of kindness is caught in Ego I: “I am being kind to somebody.” This has a lot of worry and stress; sometimes it includes bad calculations and stupidity, so your kindness can bring positive results to the person you are trying to help and bad karma to yourself. With Spiritual Kindness, you have to understand the right way to be kind and how the system of life works. If you don’t understand it, your kindness will never become spiritual.
You’ve already learnt the basic idea of kindness without ego from the Four Eternal Hearts, but now we can go deeper. What is true Spiritual Kindness without Ego?
Six Stages of Understanding
Understanding Buddhism has six levels:
- Remember the idea.
- Remember the idea and understand it.
- Feel the idea.
- Feel the idea and understand it by heart, full of joy, without fear.
- Understand the idea by heart and do it.
- Do the idea without effort, as part of your nature.
When you complete all the stages, you will have perfect understanding and be out of suffering.
True, Pure, No-Ego Kindness
Dragon Buddha appeared as a Greatest Wisdom Bodhisattva and he met Pure Name Buddha, also appearing as a bodhisattva, when Siddhartha Buddha was in India. Many Buddhas manifested as bodhisattvas because their Wills were to divide consciousness and come to Earth to support Siddhartha teach his students.
They talked about kindness, although first, they discussed what a human being is and what life is.
Pure Name Buddha said, “Spiritual consciousnesses such as bodhisattvas and Buddhas refer to “Normal Life” (i.e. human beings, animals, and life on other planets that are not purely spiritual) as a “combination life-form” or “combination consciousness”. This is because your feeling and thinking power comes from combinations of growing up, parents, friends, etc. No experience can be completely separate because your heart is influenced by combinations of everything.”
Then Dragon Buddha asked Pure Name Buddha, “What is Normal Life consciousness from a spiritual point of view?”
Pure Name Buddha replied, “Compared to the universe, their life is so short that it’s like the popping of a bubble is to a human, but a million times shorter. It’s like lightning that has already disappeared, like a cloud that melts into the air. Normal life-forms are weak, their consciousness is influenced by many things, they have incomplete power, they are continually changing, and they live in illusion. Because of this, they don’t have complete wisdom. Their heart power is not a hundred per cent sure.”
Dragon Buddha asked, “If they are just illusions, how can we be kind to them?”
Pure Name Buddha then explained the thirty different types of spiritual kindness toward every Normal Life.
The First Spiritual Kindness: True Kindness
Although a Normal Life’s heart is unsure, they have the potential to learn wisdom, to become awakened, and understand the system of life.
If a seed is nearly ready to grow and you don’t give it water, then that seed will die. So a Buddha or bodhisattva will go to a planet to see which spiritual seed is ready (which consciousness’s heart or mind is ready to learn Spirits) to give them wisdom water and kindness dirt, and help them grow.
When the consciousness understands the truth of life, they have eternal wisdom and don’t have to rely on any other power. That is True Kindness: to help them learn the truth at a time when they are ready and to truly want to help them so they receive true effect, true benefit. If you see someone who is ready to learn Spirits, then you will help them. If they aren’t ready, then you won’t push them.
The Second Spiritual Kindness: Completely Equal and Calm Kindness
All life forms have the same essence, so they are equal. When you understand this, you will not be scared by any form.
If you give a child some mud and they make a devil, they will feel scared. If they change it and make a Buddha, they will feel happy. If they change it into a snake, they will run away. The child takes the forms as real; this is blindness and stupidity.
Our unawakened consciousness creates our life in an imperfect way and then gets scared like the child. Life is not supposed to have fear and worry. The child has blind illusion, forgets that they created the form, and gets scared. We take our temporary ego too seriously and we get scared. Every life form that creates suffering, worry, and stress for itself is stupid, like the child.
The mud can have the form of a devil, but the mud is not a devil. If you change the mud to the shape of a Buddha, the mud is not a Buddha. Life has the power to create every form, but the essence is not something you can create. You have created a human body, but you are not this human body. There is a power behind this body which created this body: your true heart, your true self.
So Buddhas and bodhisattvas will teach anyone who is ready to understand how life works. They know that the essence of life can change and create any life form. Your consciousness is not your appearing form.
Bodhisattvas have the power to be very calm and not get lost in the illusion, or scared by the devil. Bodhisattvas have no fear, only peace. Because they have so much wisdom they can use that calm power to help every life awaken and learn wisdom.
The second kindness is complete calmness to help every life. Every life is equal: the devil, the snake, and the Buddha are all equal, all mud. Because the forms are all illusion, the bodhisattva feels no fear. They have an equal heart to be kind to every life. If you learn to be kind in this way, you will not have fear or worry.
Sean Pig: What about physical suffering in this lifetime, from our karma?
Physical suffering comes from getting lost.
Sean Pig: What about the bodhisattva who fed himself to a tiger?
He did not have suffering. He can incarnate on this planet like us, but his consciousness is not lost in the body. He already knows that the form is an illusion, so he is able to go out-of-body at any time. He is so free that he is not attached to it. He doesn’t care that he cuts it up and feeds it to the tiger.
If you want to climb the highest mountain, you have to begin with the first step. This book teaches wisdom at the highest level, but it’s still good to learn what the goal is, then progress step by step.
The Third Spiritual Kindness: Free-from-Worry Kindness
Bodhisattvas don’t take their Ego seriously; it’s temporary, an illusion, therefore they have no worry. Being possessive towards their own body, ego, and whatever they can be connected to (“I and my”: my family, my materials, my car, my business, my work), all this kind of worry is totally cleaned out.
Every Normal Life has worry; bodhisattvas don’t have worry. Why? Because they know they have already found the true essence. The boy who plays with the mud isn’t the mud. If he makes a devil, he is not a devil. If he changes it into a Buddha, he is not a Buddha. A bodhisattva is free from all these illusions and no longer limited by them.
Where does worry come from? Worry comes from ego: “This life-form is ME; this life-form is important.” You worry about yourself, and then you worry about everything connected to you: people you care about, your job, your car… Every connection creates a new worry. A bodhisattva knows this is just a temporary illusion. Worry never enters their heart: they live worry-free.
With this kind of power, a bodhisattva can divide their consciousness, go to different planets, be born there, and help every life to become wise and free from worry. That’s the third kindness, to be free from worry.
We cannot reach this perfect state yet, but we are slowly getting there, starting from the lowest level. It is not your level to be that way, but is your goal to be that way. Only twenty-seven kindnesses to go!
Sean Pig: How does a pre-bodhisattva like you calculate when someone is ready to learn (First Kindness)?
I test people. I get to know their ego; are they willing to have good heart? They don’t even need a good heart; they just need to be willing to learn. It’s like Frank saying earlier, “There are some people missing. Where is Monkey? Where is Tim Pig?” He is not the one who is organising this trip to Taiwan, but if he notices that someone isn’t there, he will draw it to my attention. So in small acts like this, I see that he has a good heart.
The first Bodhisattva Character is generosity: that means a good heart that wants to share. If they don’t have this, then I keep them at a distance: their spiritual seed is not ready to grow.
Sometimes I observe their speaking and action. I talk to them, question them: “What are you looking for in life?” If they tell me, “I want to work hard”, I ask them why. They say, “So I can be rich.” Again, I ask why. “So I can make a lot of investments.” Why? “So I can earn more money.” Then they are lost; they are a slave to greed. There’s no kindness, no sharing, no good emotion behind their actions, just greed. With people like that I just smile and let them go, free to do what they want.
When I first met Red Bull, I asked him, “What do you want in life?”
He replied, “I want to have a big, big castle, a beautiful wife, and six kids.”
“Why six kids?”
“Because that’s a good number.”
So, from what he said, I could tell that he was really messed up. Based on that, I should have kicked him out right away. Why do you think I didn’t?
Monkey: Is it because he was interested in Chi Gong, so he was curious to know more?
Yes, being curious is a good sign, but if you don’t have a good heart, it still won’t work. Curiosity can also be the result of a greedy heart.
Sean Rat: Is it because you could feel that he was looking to have fun and be joyful?
Also correct. When he came to train, he always greeted me with a friendly smile. Smiling straight away showed that he had good intention towards other people. Even though he had a lot of fear and trickiness, generally he wanted to be nice.
That smile gave him the first chance, and his curiosity about Chi Gong gave him the second chance. Thirdly, his voice has a naturally friendly tone; I could feel that he has a good heart, although he was still greedy and blind at that time.
Red Bull: I thought that having a big family would bring me happiness.
Searching for happiness is blind greed. We are not supposed to search for happiness; we are supposed to have the wisdom to observe and create happiness. If you search for happiness, you will never get it. Red Bull didn’t get it. It’s only when he learned philosophy and developed Spirits that he became the happiness.
Does anyone else want to know why they were accepted as a student? Andrew. Just from his appearance, I already knew that I would like him. Look at his eyebrows, look at his nose, and look at his head: everything is balanced. Everything about him was saying one thing: he is pure (at this stage of his development). He was pure, simple, and direct, but at that time, he also had a lot of problems. He used drugs too much, damaging his awareness power. His thinking was very slow, his speaking and reactions were very slow. I likened him to a piece of dead wood, but he had a calm and peaceful presence, and a non-aggressive nature. His body language showed that, so I saw potential for the seed to grow.
Who else put up their hand? Simon. Ooh, he has really lucky karma. If he had asked me a million times, I would never have accepted him as a student, but his karma made him want to train with me no matter what.
I found out that he used most of the compensation from a car accident to buy drugs which made his body really sick. He was underweight, his shoulders were twisted out of alignment, and his hair was grey. When he told me he was 18, I was shocked. His hair was turning grey because his liver, kidneys, and lungs were damaged by the alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs. To teach someone like this to be a martial art hero would be incredibly difficult, so of course I didn’t want to bother.
But I had come to Australia on holiday. Simon had been learning Tai Chi from a master who thought he was the best in Australia because he had defeated so many others. Simon would look at him as if to say, “Oh, he beat me again, he’s so good. My master is the best.” Then on the day we met, I defeated his master while holding a water bottle and jacket in one hand. Then Simon looked at me like “Oh that is so cool.” His face lit up; he was no longer interested in studying with the old master; I could see that he was excited to learn.
At my stage of development, I want to have bodhisattva-level discipline. If Simon really wanted to learn from heart, even though he was damaged, I couldn’t refuse. I really didn’t want to help because he was so damaged, but he really wanted to learn. I often tried to scare him away as a test: I took a bamboo stick and smacked his arse. “You are doing this so badly!” But he still stayed, he still wanted to learn. So I thought, “Ok, you passed the test. What can I do?” And today, he’s super high-level in many areas.
This post is taken from a talk by Forever Wisdom Forest on 11 August 2011 at Guan Yin temple, Taiwan.
