- First, don’t have too high expectations of an enlightened master. The enlightened master in our minds must surely be sagely, virtuous, and compassionate. Little do we realize that for most enlightened masters, only their view is sound and well established; their habitual tendencies and desires are not yet thoroughly purified. Fully overcoming these habitual tendencies and desires requires a complete transformation of the physical body, but their view alone suffices to guide you onto the right path in your cultivation, so that you won’t go astray.
- Not every enlightened master can know the capacities of sentient beings thoroughly and teach the Dharma accordingly. Don’t reject him just because he can’t resolve the problems you currently face; see whether his teachings can benefit most people.
- Don’t expect an enlightened master to know everything. It is rare to find a master who has cultivated and realized both the transcendental Dharma and the worldly Dharma to complete perfection; some monastic masters are quite poor at handling problems in worldly matters. An enlightened master also goes through a process of perfecting himself, and he too needs the understanding and tolerance of others.
- If you can meet a master who is fully accomplished in both worldly and supramundane affairs to guide your cultivation and realization, then you are truly fortunate across three lifetimes. Please cherish your karmic opportunity and blessings and cultivate diligently. Don’t use your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind to make distinctions about the enlightened master’s actions.
- If in our cultivation and realization we can constantly reflect on ourselves and look for our own problems and faults, then there will be no lack of good spiritual friends around us. Although everyone around us has habitual tendencies and desires, the corrections they give you come from different angles precisely in order to help you become perfect. If you have the breadth of mind to accommodate all kinds of criticism, then all sentient beings can help bring you to perfection — it’s just that they use habitual tendencies and attachment, while an enlightened master uses wisdom.
- Not every enlightened master is compassionate or endowed with spiritual powers.
Genuine compassion is truly difficult to arouse. When a person’s mind has settled into its own proper place, if he cannot arouse compassion, he will absolutely not want to deliver sentient beings or take up the work of spreading the Dharma and benefiting living beings. The greed, hatred, delusion, arrogance, and doubt of sentient beings are too heavy, and their attachment is too strong; an unperfected enlightened master, for his part, does not have enough skillful means. The boundless desires and exacting demands of sentient beings will lead them to nail every enlightened master to a cross. An enlightened master’s mind has already returned to the ordinary, and he has understood the true meaning of the ordinary. His demands on this world are extremely low — one meal a day, one ladle of water, and one thatched hut suffice for him to live out his life quietly in any corner of the world. This is perhaps the way of life that best suits his “habitual tendencies.”
Therefore, if an enlightened master is not yet fully perfected, he cannot truly experience the state of unconditional loving-kindness and great compassion of oneness with all beings; he cannot take the suffering of sentient beings as his own suffering or the joy of sentient beings as his own joy. Therefore, in this world you cannot see the true Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in their physical forms, because even a fully perfected master must bear the karmic obstacles of sentient beings and must manifest the appearances of birth, aging, sickness, and death. After his liberation is perfected, he will truly become one with sentient beings: when sentient beings suffer, he suffers. He no longer distinguishes between liberation and non-liberation, and he is unwilling — or finds it unnecessary — to transform afflictions into bodhi. He is truly suffering; only the root of this suffering comes from sentient beings rather than from his own desires. If you do not look at his view, his conduct looks more like that of an ordinary person. It is just that whether he enjoys pleasure or suffers pain, he remains at peace in his mind and completely free and at ease.
A truly perfected enlightened master, however, manifests compassion in many different ways, and sentient beings cannot determine from his behavior whether he is compassionate or not. His compassion sometimes manifests as hitting, scolding, or killing — any one of greed, hatred, delusion, arrogance, and doubt. For a perfected master, it is merely a form of expression, having nothing to do with habitual tendencies. True compassion is the equality of nature and characteristics grounded in a thorough penetration of cause and effect; any behavior that accords with the Way is called compassion. It is not something we can understand from the standpoint of human sentiment.
Spiritual powers are merely by-products of genuinely realizing the Buddhadharma through practice. A person with spiritual powers is not necessarily an enlightened master, but a master with accomplishments in genuine practice will surely have spiritual powers. Do not be infatuated with or pursue spiritual powers, and do not judge an enlightened master by whether he has them. Seeing the Way, realizing the Way, and attaining the Way are the three stages of cultivation and realization. Only after seeing the Way does one’s view truly become established, and one can then be called an enlightened master; realizing the Way is when body and mind genuinely realize that emptiness, and spiritual powers appear in the course of it. Attaining the Way is being able to apply what has been realized perfectly in daily life, whether in transcending the world or in engaging with the world. Such a master is a truly perfected enlightened master. In spreading the Dharma he can offer sentient beings more skillful means, his mind is connected with all Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, and the blessing powers of his body, speech, and mind are all exceedingly great.
May every one of us who cultivates the Buddhadharma accumulate more merit and blessings, so that when we meet an enlightened master, our greed, hatred, delusion, arrogance, and doubt, and our ignorance will not cause adverse conditions to block our path and make us brush past the enlightened master. In the Dharma-Ending Age, enlightened masters and good disciples are both too rare to come by.
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