What Is Fake Vain?
Simon: It’s like being proud of something you should be ashamed of.
Sifu: That’s an overly strong way to put it, but it’s essentially correct.
Sean Pig: Pretending you’re sure and that you know something you really know nothing about.
Sifu: That’s also part of it.
Sean Rat: Putting importance in things that have no real value.
Sifu: Yes, that covers every angle.
For example, I saw a woman on the bus with beautiful and expensive jewellery. Her clothes were stylish and colourful. Everybody paid attention to her, but when I looked more closely, I was put off because her face was full of suffering and anger. She was wrinkled, overweight, and pale. She had a devilish body full of suffering dressed in beautiful clothes and jewels. That’s Fake Vain: she thought that because she put on all these beautiful things, she would be beautiful.
Many movie stars think “Everybody loves me”, but what their fans really love is the image portrayed in their movies. The fans don’t know the movie star. To be crazy about everybody loving you when no-one even knows you is also Fake Vain.
Buddha says that humans spend lifetime after lifetime chasing Fake Social fame, but truly, no-one cares about you. What they care about is the fake image you present to them. If you present a fake image, it means you don’t even care about yourself. How can you expect others to care about you when they can never know you? Do not engage in this kind of fake-social behaviour. If you do, it means your time in this life is wasted.
“Social” means acting for some purpose – business, image, worrying about appearances – so nothing is real. If you live in that kind of habitual pretence, it will drive you crazy.
You do need social skills to get along with other people – when you’re catching a taxi, working, or eating at a restaurant – that’s called maturity. The only time you would consider using Fake Social is to create harmony because you have to be involved with people (the taxi driver, your workmates, the waiter). Otherwise, don’t do it.
Think about all the people you’ve met who were friendly and sociable with you: do any of them know you? Do any of them care about you?
You spend 8 hours a day sleeping, 8 hours working, 6 hours eating, cleaning, exercising, and travelling. That only leaves 2 hours for everything else. You only have a little time each day to think about your life: Who are you? What are you going to learn? What is your direction?
If you use those two hours being Fake Social, you will have no time left for Spirits: your whole life will be a blind illusion. You will be a slave to work and Fake Vain, trying to impress people who never really care about you. Everybody thinks about themselves. When they say “You are so cool!” they are only using you to satisfy something in themselves.
If you don’t clean out this illusion, you are wasting your life.
Fake Vain is why I have a rule not to show off my Tai Chi ability all the time. I only demonstrate when people are able to learn from it, and then I make you copy it. If you spend all your time just watching me, you will never learn anything: you must practise it, too.
So try to find a middle way. Don’t cut yourself off from the people around you, but don’t go crazy trying to impress them either.
What Drives People To Be Fake Vain?
Fake Vain is driven by a lack of self-confidence, self-respect, and self-contentment. Such people need to dress up the outside with fake things to make others think they’re cool or strong or beautiful, like the woman on the bus. If you’re truly cool, you don’t care what other people think.
My self-contentment comes from Spirits: first realising that it exists, then experiencing it, understanding the truth of life, and valuing wisdom. Nobody else can change these things; nobody can take them away from me. No matter how far I go in learning Spirits, I always feel great about my life. A devil can’t take it away, and a Buddha won’t put me down because I’m not high enough.
What’s important is that you truly feel your life is great. What does it matter if everyone else on Earth thinks your life is bad? They don’t know what you’ve experienced. They don’t know what you’ve learned. You have to be the judge as to whether your life is great or not, no-one else.
Truly, you can’t lie to yourself: you know when your life is bad and you know when your life is great.
All this new wisdom will help you clean out your life. The more you clean it out, the lighter, sharper, more certain and joyful it becomes.
Don’t let anything stop you from coming to class because if you truly want to go to the Pure Land, this is the only, tiny discipline you have to follow: a couple of hours a week. That’s only one percent of your time in return for the opportunity to get out of suffering, death, and reincarnation, and have eternal life. The deal is awesome.
If you can’t create the discipline to do what is required, you will not be pure enough to transit your consciousness to the Pure Land. You need to prove it to yourself: not to me, not to Amitabha.
I care for your development, so I don’t want to charge you to attend this class, but that would not be good for your karma. If you want to learn Spirits, but you don’t want to share something in return, it’s like taking advantage of Spirits. I want to be generous towards you, but I don’t want you to become greedy and take advantage of the situation: that would be as if you don’t value Spirits, so you wouldn’t be pure and won’t make it to the Pure Land.
In all this earth, there is nothing to hold. You experience so much suffering from your connections to it. You are here to learn how to see through all of this. That’s where wisdom comes from, and then true joy starts opening.
All the pain you have is not something for you to hold, it’s to help you find the wisdom to release it and let it go. All the greed and stupidity you have is not for you to get trapped in, it’s for you to develop wisdom and clean it out.
Wills To Reach Amitabha’s Pure Land
My second Will is to help you go to Amitabha Buddha’s Pure Land. That’s actually why I started my first Will: to teach someone to reach the first level of pureness to see through the trick of life, perform meditation and produce Spiritual lights, being no longer attached to this ego. This Will is already complete because Vince is the first person to reach it, but all of you have the potential to reach it, too.
Achieving that power gave him the chance to go out-of-body with me, but then we could only go to the pre-bodhisattva Pure Land. There, he would attain the same level as me and start his Will, go to a different planet, become a sifu (teacher), and help people. But he would also have suffering as I do because a pre-bodhisattva has to learn a new wisdom: to help people without experiencing suffering, to see through all the tricks and become joyful without suffering. That’s the basis of Spirits.
After that, you understand that true joy is to purify yourself and use your wisdom to see through everything to help every life, every lifetime. Once your compassion opens to help everyone, suddenly your wisdom is so high that you can protect yourself and help them without suffering. Then you become a bodhisattva.
This first-level spiritual consciousness has the wisdom to see through the trick of life (through their blind ego which creates suffering), has the wisdom not to hold negative things, and has compassion to help others. Their life becomes beautiful, Spirits develops higher, and wisdom grows stronger.
The journey to become bodhisattva takes so many lifetimes that Amitabha developed his Pure Land to make it easier. In just one lifetime, all suffering will cease. You can learn Spirits and become a bodhisattva there without any suffering.
That’s why all the Buddhas say Amitabha’s 17th Will – to create his Pure Land – is amazing.
If you want your life to change, you first have to change your heart. Make sure your heart in this lifetime has no greedy, ego stupidity because that character doesn’t suit a spiritual land. If your heart is blind and lost in this material world, that’s from your choice. No-one else can make you go to the Pure Land; it’s only if your heart wants to stay pure that you will go there.
See the truth, don’t get stuck in your illusion, and don’t let outside illusion control you. When you have the wisdom to see through all this, then the Pure Land becomes your karma.
You all come here to the dojo to learn: that comes from your heart, too.
Life Is Illusion, Life Is Perfect
Do you feel the expression “Everything is illusion” is good, neutral, or bad?
Andrew: It’s neutral because you have free will to make it good or bad; it all depends on how you choose to perceive that illusion.
Matt Horse: It’s positive because if you know that it’s an illusion, you can learn to take everything light because it’s not real.
Vince: That’s a trick question. Illusion is perfect because it can teach you forever.
Sifu: That’s the true answer: illusion is perfect. Good, neutral, and bad are all part of your blind illusion.
“Life is illusion” equals “Life is perfect”. Everything continues to change. That means you will not get bored. If life never changed, that would be incredibly boring. Just the idea of it is terrible. It doesn’t matter what you are doing, you can’t move any more. It’s like your heart is imprisoned for all eternity.
So, illusion already gives us our first joy because it is always changing. Life is always going to have a sense of surprise, so we can always observe the changing and learn something. If you understand the Buddhist meaning of illusion and see the answer from every angle, you will see that it is a perfect design.
Even Hell is perfect. A consciousness will go to Hell because they have killed and tortured millions of people, but if there was no place for them to be punished, they will stay here on Earth and torture more life. It would be a terrible place to live. Yet if you don’t have this kind of bad intention, you will never go to Hell, so even Hell is perfect. If the Hell illusion is perfect, how can any other illusion not be perfect?
The only reason you can’t see that life is perfect is because you are stuck in your blind illusion heart.
N.B. “Life is illusion” refers to Illusion Being; it has nothing to do with being blind or not blind.
This post is taken from a talk by Forever Wisdom Forest on 18 November 2011 at the Sydney dojo.
