Week of August 8, 2004 - Repentance
The three preliminaries for Practice are: Repentance, Appreciation, and Vows.
Repentance is not just feeling sorry about your behavior or making a confession. It consists of two parts:
a) The discovery of one’s shortcomings, wrongful actions, or harms done to one’s self or others
b) and the determination of actions to be taken to improve or redeem the wrongful acts.
It is difficult to find out one’s own faults, more difficult to admit them, and extremely difficult to rise above them. Yet it is through this ongoing process of self-examination and improvement that one grows mentally and spiritually.
Meditation helps to increase one’s awareness and mindfulness so one can repent well, and repentance helps to purify one’s mind and actions which are the preliminaries for Practice (meditation is one method of Practice). The two are interrelated and influence each other.
One should repent often, give a thoughtful examination of one’s daily actions and look for ways to improve them. Without repentance, one cannot progress very far on the Bodhi Path.
The three preliminaries for Practice are: Repentance, Appreciation, and Vows.
Repentance is not just feeling sorry about your behavior or making a confession. It consists of two parts:
a) The discovery of one’s shortcomings, wrongful actions, or harms done to one’s self or others
b) and the determination of actions to be taken to improve or redeem the wrongful acts.
It is difficult to find out one’s own faults, more difficult to admit them, and extremely difficult to rise above them. Yet it is through this ongoing process of self-examination and improvement that one grows mentally and spiritually.
Meditation helps to increase one’s awareness and mindfulness so one can repent well, and repentance helps to purify one’s mind and actions which are the preliminaries for Practice (meditation is one method of Practice). The two are interrelated and influence each other.
One should repent often, give a thoughtful examination of one’s daily actions and look for ways to improve them. Without repentance, one cannot progress very far on the Bodhi Path.
All the evil karma that I created in bygone days
Resulted from greed, hatred and ignorance since time without beginning
Arising out of body, speech and mind
For all these karma I now remorsefully repent.
The Avatamsaka Sutra
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