因果
Yin Guo
Cause & Effect
The law of Cause & Effect, or karma, stretches further back than your parents and grandparents. Some people might feel there is an obstruction in their lives despite having a path. It could be compared to a train: it does not stop immediately once you hit the break. It slowly comes to a halt. The karmic afflictions can be pushed and delayed for one year, two years, three years or four years. Sometimes it can be negotiated and sometimes no negotiations are possible. Pushing them backwards does not mean they are eradicated. Only high priests like Jesus can take karmic afflictions away at any given time. But the greatest power rests with you. It relies on yourself. Only two characters are vital:
‘放下’
“Fang Xia.”
“Let go! Put down!”
If you do not let go of your burden, then you carry on shouldering them. It is that simple. But if your bundle is one hundred Chinese pounds heavy and you put down one pound per month, this still counts as an improvement. It took Li Shifu ten years to put down one Chinese pound of his burden.
When you at last put it all down, you cut the thread between Cause & Effect. Karmic afflictions require bitterness and tiredness to be eradicated. Half of the tiredness is physical and half is mental, speaking from a Yin-Yang perspective. Actually half of the tiredness comes from physical bitterness and another great half, from mental bitterness; in fact sixty to seventy percent are mental. Mental suffering can be like a catalyst or like yeast, setting in motion the process of diminishing your karmic afflictions and providing a starting point for changing your destiny. That is why you must practice asceticism, which in Chinese literally means the ‘Practice of Bitterness’:
No one likes to eat bitterness.
No one likes to be subjected to tiredness.
No one likes to do what they do not like.
Article written by Johan Hausen (Cheng Cai)
for Five Immortals Temple, China
