Chapter 11 flower life
After a speech, an audience member asked me: "Mr. Lin kept telling us to love life in his speech, but the podium was covered with flowers. Aren't flowers life? Why can't we love the life of an animal instead of a flower?" What about life?"
Indeed, flowers are also a kind of life. From the point of view of Buddhism, life can be divided into two forms, one is sentient life, and the other is ruthless life.
Everything that has birth and death is life, even a flower.A piece of grass or a stone is also life, but a sentient life has three characteristics besides birth and death:
One is to have emotions, feelings of love, such as joy or sadness, happiness or pain due to emotional encounters.
The second is lust, the desire for love, and attempts to satisfy this desire.Pursue and rush.
The third is to have emotional awareness, have the views, thoughts and consciousness of love, and hope that one's love will be complete and reach the ideal state.
If we harm sentient beings with emotions, desires, and sentient beings, they will immediately suffer great pain. For example, if we cut off the head of a cat and put it on the podium, the cat will immediately lose its soul. It can also feel very scary.
But a flower is a life without emotion, lust, and emotional consciousness. When it is cut and placed in a vase, it will not immediately cause great pain. It will still bloom beautifully until it withers.
Theoretically, those who truly cherish life should cherish the life of a flower, a branch of grass, or a stone, but what is more urgent is to love those sentient beings who have emotions, desires, and sentient beings. With this empathetic love, To develop the quality of love, the quality of compassion, the quality of tenderness within us.
If we cannot cherish sentient beings, how can we cherish those merciless beings?
Flowers, taking life as a dedication, make us feel the beauty of life, let us wish our hearts are as beautiful as flowers, and love all life. In this way, the life of a flower has incomparable value.