Who deserve to die?

A lot of friends have considered me as a good person because of the charity work I've done in the past few years. So the initial reaction they have is why must good people suffered from this kind of tragedy? I remember my chum Ker Chin, was swearing on the phone, non-stop when she knows about my illness, and she seems to be angry about why this would happen to me.

Our mind distinguishes good or bad and jumps into conclusion very fast. We perceive good people has to live longer and bad people has to be short lived, most of the time we forgot the good and the bad people are the same, we need love and compassion, we suffer from the same; breaking up, regrets, old age, sickness, abandons, loss of love ones and even death. With that in mind, I can’t help but to wonder so who deserve to die? We all have to leave this world one day regardless good or bad. It’s our current action and their consequences that we should judge.

Once, the Buddha asked his disciples to get a large magnificent elephant and six blind men. He then brought the blind to the elephant and asked them to describe what an elephant looks like.

The first blind man touched the elephant leg and reported that it “looked" like a tree trunk.

The second blind man touched the elephant’s stomach and said that the elephant was a wall.

The third blind man touched the elephant ear and said that it was a fan.

The fourth blind man touched the elephant’s tail and described the elephant as a piece of rope.

The fifth blind man felt the elephant's tusks and described it as a spear.

And the sixth blind man rubbed the elephant’s snout and got very scared because he thought it was a snake.

All of them got into a big argument about the "appearance" of an elephant.

The Buddha asked the citizens: "Each blind man had touched the elephant but each of them gives a different description of the animal. Which answer is right?"

"All of them are right," was the reply.

All of us choose to see what we want to see and we fail to see the bigger picture, we are all somehow interconnected. Wrong view creates fear and anger and instead of helping us to justify our loss for love ones, we created more negativity and mental tortures. We should see all as one and one as all. In this way, when we face and perceive what’s unfair, we are able to let go easily and transform our mind into better use.

In the end, no one deserves to die, a bad person can always turn into a good kind hearted man in future... 

Beginning Anew

"During the Vietnam War there was an American soldier who got very angry because most of the soldiers in his unit got killed in an ambush by Vietnamese guerrillas; that happened in a village in the countryside, so out of his rage he wanted to retaliate. He wanted to kill a number of people who belonged to that village. So he took out a bag of sandwiches, and he mixed explosives into the sandwiches and left them at the entrance to the village. He saw children coming out and happily taking the sandwiches, thinking that someone had left these delicious sandwiches, and they ate together, enjoying a lot. 

And just half an hour later he saw them begin to show signs of suffering. Their father and their mother and sister came, and tried to help, to give them massage and medicine, but the American soldier who had hidden himself not far from there, knew very well there was no way to save these children, and that they would die. He knew that even if they had a car to transport these children to the hospital it would be too late. Out of anger he had done things like that. If anger is strong in us, we are capable of doing anything, even the cruelest things.

When he went back to America he suffered because of that: that scene appeared to him in his dreams, and he could never forget it. Any time during the day if he found himself alone in a room with children, he could not stay, and had to run out of the room right away. He could not talk about that to anyone except to his mother, who said, 'Well, that was the war, and in a war you cannot prevent these things happening.' But that did not help him, until he came to a retreat organized by Plum Village in North America. 

During many days he was not able to tell people of his story. It was a very difficult retreat. We sat in circles of five or six people, and invited people to speak out about their suffering, but there were those who sat there unable to open their mouths. There were war veterans who were deeply wounded inside, and fear and despair were still there. Finally that American Vietnam War veteran was able to tell us the story of the explosives put into the sandwiches. It was very good for him to be able to tell it, especially in front of the Vietnamese people, his former enemies. I gave him a prescription. I had a private consultation with him, and I said:

'Now look, you killed five children, yes. And that is not a good thing to do, yes. But don’t you know that many children are dying in this very moment, everywhere, even in America, because of lack of medicine, of food? Do you know that 40,000 children die every day in the world, just because of the lack of medicine and food? And you are alive, you are solid physically. Why don’t you use your life to help the children who are dying in this moment? Why get caught in the five children who have died in the past? There are many ways…if you want, I will tell you how to save five children today. There are children who need only one table of medicine to be saved, and you can be the one who brings that tablet of medicine to him or to her. If you practice like that every day, the children who died because of the explosives will smile in you, because these five children have participated in your work of saving many children who are dying in this very moment.' 

So, the door was opened, so that the man was longer trapped in the feeling of culpability. That is theamrita, the ambrosia of compassion, of wisdom, offered by the Buddha: there is always a way out.

So that war veteran has practiced and has been able to help many other children in the world. He has gone back to Vietnam, has done the work of reconciliation, and the five children who died have begun to smile in him and to become one with him.

In the beginning it was a distressing image, but now the five children have become alive, have become the energy helping him to live with compassion, with understanding. The garbage can be transformed into flowers if we know how to do it."

Side notes: I feel incredibly honored how my friends think of me as a source of their inspiration but nonetheless, that shouldn't change our perception how we should react or how we perceive our misfortune.