God Seekers in Asia - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 224

not buy, sell, or trade weapons. Do not earn your livelihood through deceitful practices.
Engage in nothing that brings suffering or even discomfort to others.
Right effort: “Buddha laid tremendous stress on the will… There are virtues that must
be developed, passions to be curbed, and evil mind states to be transcended if love and de-
tachment” are to prevail. [181]
Right mindfulness: Ignorance, not sin, is a major impediment to the virtuous life.
Check your mind. Be on your guard. Pull yourself out, as an elephant from the mud. [182]
“Better than a hundred years lived in vice without contemplation is one single day lived in
virtue and deep contemplation.” [183]
Right Meditation: “When the mind is fully stilled, it becomes a quiet pool in which the
true nature of everything is clearly reflected.” [184]
Better than a hundred years of not considering how all things arise and pass away
is one single day of life if one considers how all things arise and pass away…Better
than a hundred years of not seeing the Eightfold Path than a single day of seeing the
Path… [185]
THE BUDDHA AS TEACHER
As teacher and preacher, the Buddha was constantly on the road, speaking to crowds, gath-
ering followers, setting up communities of monks. Tradition has him teaching and preach-
ing into his eighth decade. Tradition also describes him as a dynamic teacher, using ges-
tures and signs to help convey his message. These gestures, or mudras (of which more
presently), are the familiar iconography of Buddhism.
A framework for the Buddha's teaching are ideas and concepts anchored in Hindu cos-
mology. Samsara (literally “keep going”) is the endless cycle “of death and rebirth that pro-
pels people from one life to the next.” [186] Karma is the universal law of cause and effect.
Good deeds and bad deeds carry into the next existence and affect life lived there in the
endless cycle of death and rebirth. Nirvana means literally the blowing out of the flame of
the self “which brings enlightenment and liberation from pain (dukka).” [187] The end of the
cycle of birth and rebirth, the end of suffering and desire, to become one with the universe,
as the wheel of existence stops turning.
No suffering for him
Who is free from sorrow
Free from the fetters of life
Free in everything he does