Recognizing When Something Does Or Does Not Accord With The Dharma

This dharma session will come to completion this afternoon. Impermanence is truly swift. Time flies by so quickly. These past few days of bowing in repentance, sometimes it felt stupefying and overwhelming, losing track of time, not knowing what day of the week it was or how many days had passed. All in all we just follow the repentance text and keep on bowing.

Looking at the dharma friends who participated in this repentance session, we can see the varying degrees of blessings, karmic forces, causes-and-conditions, and responsibilities among beings in the human realm. The number of people who are able to participate seems to dwindle year by year. Some of the seniors who used to come all the time in the past are no longer present. They have moved to another dimension. They have a new host within the ten dharma realms, and we are not able to make contact with them at the moment.

There have been great changes. Those who do join the session, albeit few, are mostly very sincere. According to what I heard, there may be twenty, thirty, or maybe forty people coming to Gold Wheel Monastery for the Emperor’s Liang’s Jeweled Repentance. Although I can count the number of heads, I am not interested to do it because of my blurry vision.

Personally, I feel a difference in this year’s repentance session compared to the repentance sessions from previous years. I remember the time when I first came to Gold Wheel Monastery, the dharma friends placed special emphasis on Emperor Liang’s Jeweled Repentance. If I remember correctly, sometimes we would hold two or even three repentance sessions in a year. Therefore, at that time, people were extremely enthusiastic and paid great attention to the repentance sessions. Haplessly, my karmic obstructions at that time were such that I was not able to fully immerse myself in the repentance sessions. Maybe after having participated in the repentance sessions for a few years, along with the Buddha’s blessings, and the Venerable Master’s kind and compassionate take-in, I feel a difference in this year’s repentance session. Although there remain many similarities, this year I felt a sense of lightness and bliss permeating throughout my body and mind. I did not experience this in the past. Therefore, I think it is very important to seek repentance as much as possible.

Today, the Venerable Master’s instructional talk extensively discussed about the single thought of the mind. This single thought of the mind is something that all of us have to pay extremely close attention to.