Published Saturday, 12 September 2015
Here and hereafter
those who live their lives well, abide in happiness.
They are filled with a natural appreciation of virtue,
and dwell in delight.Dhammapada 18
Transformation takes energy. The energy that most of us have in abundance - greed, anger and delusion - is wild and dangerous; uncontained it leads to intolerable suffering. To ‘live life well’ means to build up a storehouse of goodness so that when these wild energies threaten to leak out, we are not overwhelmed. By cultivating such forces of goodness as restraint and wise reflection, we begin to transform this wild energy into something more suitably human: generosity, kindness and understanding. The Buddha describes how this path of practice leads to an abiding filled with delight. Our work is finding the willingness to begin again, however many times we fail.