We can all see that the coronavirus crisis is entering a new phase. We’ve arrived at a position where the great majority of countries in the world have accepted that a lockdown was necessary, some places more strict than others. Some places were quicker off the mark than others. There’s a lot of controversy around whether it was done in time, whether it wasn't done in time. But there's a general consensus around the planet that some sort of lockdown was needed and that's happened in a great majority of countries.
Now, we are getting to the point where we are realizing that we can't stay locked down forever. If the economic activity of countries simply goes into paralysis then we will have other problems - people will starve, to put it bluntly. So countries are now looking at how do we get out of this? How do we progress into the next phase? And, of course, nobody knows exactly what the next phase will look like anymore than they really knew what lockdown would look like before it happened, this is an illustration of Buddhist principles, if you like.
Buddhism has the approach of saying that what matters is the quality in which you act in the present time and that will bear fruit in the longer term. So Buddhism is future oriented, but not in the manner of setting a goal, not in the manner of having a concrete fixed plan objective and working out steps a, b, c, d, e, in order to get there, but rather in the sense of, if you act with honesty, openness, wisdom, compassion, patience, energy, enthusiasm for what is good - right intention - if you act with right intention then something good will unfold.
Of course along the way you’ll learn new things; you’ll make mistakes and so on, but something good will emerge. And so it's important to have these good qualities in the way that you act in the present time. Now this is true of the individual, it’s also true of countries. What is needed is that the leaders of countries have these qualities and that the people of countries have confidence in these qualities so they elect and choose leaders who are suitable. If they choose leaders who are corrupt, misleading, prevaricating, only interested in presenting themselves as wonderful with very little attention to the detail of the job that they are supposed to be doing, then this will have a bad outcome. We don't know exactly what sort of bad outcome but it will have a bad outcome. So this quality of the present is very important from a Buddhist point of view.
In Buddhism, we make a great deal, especially in Pureland Buddhism, of the notion, “just as you are.” We say, “Amida Buddha loves you just as you are, accepts you, just as you are”. But it's important to understand that “just as you are,” is not something fixed, static, set in aspic, it's not like that. Actually the term “just as you are,” is a translation from the Sanskrit yatha-bhutam. And yatha-bhutam doesn't exactly mean just as you are, it means closer to “just as you are becoming.”
So just as you are - what you are is a process. A process that's unfolding, this unfolding with a karmic effect so the quality with which you act has a predictable quality of outcome. Even though the detail of the outcome, the detail of the future always remains a mystery, still, the quality with which you act in the present, the quality of mind, the depth of wisdom, this will bear fruit. So you plant good quality seeds, you get good quality fruit. This is the basic principle of Buddhism applied to the practical life.
Thank you very much
Namo Amida Bu
Dharmavidya
David
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