Yoo Hoooo Debbie!

Recently, I received an email from Debbie asking "I am writing for the enquiry about an access to the transcriptions of . . . speeches conducted by Teacher Wuling. Would that it be possible to download the scripts from this website? Looking forward to hearing from you soon. Thank you."

Debbie, I have tried to answer your question from a few different email addresses at different times, but each time the email has come back as 'undeliverable-no such email address.' Hmmm. This is not the first time this has happened, so I'm trying to come up with a fall back system.

This is it!

Please feel free to download any of my talks, books etc., here, at Amitabha Buddhist Retreat Centre or at Amitabha Gallery. This goes for anyone, not just Debbie. :-)

While my books are copyrighted, I use the phrase "Some rights reserved" instead of the usual "All rights reserved." The reason for my copyright is to legally prohibit anyone from modifying the materials. (I get very cranky when I spend weeks looking for just the right photo for the cover and someone decides to reprint the book and change the cover without asking me first. ;-))

A Heart's Burden

Question: I work in the field.  Most often in bad areas where dogs are abandoned, hurting and abused.  Today I found one who's pelvis had been broken and her little leg.  There is no telling how long she'd been this way, how many people had passed her by.  I had to put her to sleep which has hurt me so much all day.

Please help me to understand why people do this.....why they would let this poor little dog suffer like this, living on the street unable to walk.  I carry each of these homeless and neglected animals with me and they stay in my head burdening my heart and mind with horrible sorrow.  I cannot let them go.

Response:  It is terrible how people can be cruel to animals or simply uncaring when they suffer. What you did for that poor dog was truly compassionate, wanting to alleviate the suffering of others, even though it caused your own suffering.

You asked how this can happen. Obviously there are people whose thinking is so disturbed that they need to hurt others. Then there are those who, unlike you, do not have the courage to become involved. Or perhaps who feel that they do not have the time. I imagine there are many different reasons, but they come down to people being in too much pain themselves to be able to take on the suffering of others. And so they inflict pain or block it out.

You do not block the animals suffering and thus you take on their suffering. But once you have helped, you need to let go or it will haunt you and, as you said, stay with you. May I suggest trying a small ceremony. Light a candle or incense and say something meaningful as a wish for the animals happiness. A Pure Land Buddhist, for example, could chant "Amituofo."

Then speak to the animal, saying it is time to move on to the next birth and that your wishes are for it to have a better next life. Than, knowing that you have helped the animal physically and spiritually, you may be better able to "let go."



How to Make Eggplant

One day a man was watching his wife preparing an eggplant for their dinner. (When I heard this story, the wife was preparing a pot roast but this is a vegetarian blog after all.) Watching her cut off and then throw away the end of the eggplant, he asked his wife why she had done that. She replied that this was the way her mother had always fixed eggplant.

His curiosity growing, he suggested they call the mother to find out the reason. When they called the mother, she replied that this was the way her mother had always fixed eggplant.

Growing increasingly agitated, the husband suggested they call the grandmother in an attempt to figure out the reason for this apparent family tradition. When they asked the grandmother, she replied that the reason was very simple—she didn’t have a large pan so she cut off the end of the eggplant to make it fit the pan she had.

If we want to truly benefit from our practice, we need to understand the principles and reasons behind what we do. Otherwise, we will just go through the motions.



We Don't Mean To

(I'm in a retreat and unable to post, so here is another entry that seems to bear repeating...)

We don't wake up in the morning and say to ourselves, “Today, I'm going to be selfish and inconsiderate. I’m going to ignore the feelings of others.” We don't consciously make the decision to do this. And yet throughout the day, we act selfishly in so many ways.

We don’t write that letter to a friend, even though we know he is looking forward to hearing from us. We again postpone that trip to the library to return that best-seller that we took out, even though we know someone is probably waiting to read it. We go shopping with one friend forgetting that we had already told another we’d go with her.

Neither do we wake up and say “Today is the day I'm going to make someone suffer.” And yet that’s what we do—cause pain.

We don't turn the heat down because we'd be uncomfortable if our home was colder.  So we contribute to global warming and people in Bangladesh who never used a light bulb are told their land is being eroded due to planetary warming from carbon emissions. We don’t visit our friend in the nursing home because we’re busy, and so our friend is alone and feel forgotten.

We get trapped by our habits, our personal inertia, and our wish for comfort.

We don’t mean to be selfish or unkind. But too often, we are.

Excuse Me, Your Name is ?

Question: Is your name spelled Wu Lin or Wu Ling?

Response: Okay, you'd think this was an easy one to answer. I mean, clearly this is an "a" or "b" type question. Right?

Would it were so.

Actually, it's a long story. You could say it began about 2000 years.

From Changing Destiny:

In the past, Chinese people might have three sets of names [in addition to their surname]: a given name, courtesy name, and sobriquet. Their given name that was given to them by their parents expressed the parent’s aspirations for their children. Changing this name was tantamount to ignoring this aspiration, truly an unfilial act.

Upon reaching adulthood, age twenty for males and sixteen for females, people were no longer addressed by the given name for to do so was disrespectful. At this time, they underwent a ceremony to be initiated into adulthood. During this ceremony, people of the same generation or older like siblings, schoolmates, and friends, would provide the courtesy name that would be used for the rest of their lives.

. . . Only one’s parents and teacher would use a person's given name after they reached adulthood; even grandparents, uncles, and emperors used the courtesy name. Thus, society accorded the same gratitude and respect to teachers as it did to parents.

In this spirit of different names to be used by different people, Buddhists monastics in China received two sets of names. When I and my brothers (both monks and nuns) were tonsured by our Teacher, Ven. Master Chin Kung, he gave each of us our two sets of names. The names that people know us by all begin with "Wu."

Okay, now let's look again at one sentence from Changing Destiny:

Only one’s parents and teacher would use a person's given name after they reached adulthood. . . .

Since one's Teacher gives one the name, in my case Wu Ling, only my Teacher can call me by that name. Not even my brothers can use it. They say Wu Ling shi, essentially Brother Wu Ling. (In case you're thinking here, well then her name is "Wu Ling! What's with the long explanation?" please bear with me as we leave China and move to the West.)

First, Lin or Ling? Actually, that has less to do with East or West and more with spelling. It should have been spelled Lin. But somehow it ended up being spelled Ling. After getting used to Ling, while living in Singapore I learned it should have been Lin. Oops.

So for a while I used "Lin." But apparently, I had become attached to Ling. (Oops, again,) So I changed it back to Ling.

A few years later, I began to spend more time in the US again. This became a problem because in Singapore, people know not to address a Buddhist monastic as "Wu Ling" but as Venerable Wu Ling, etc.  In the west, naturally people didn't know this. They were understandable happy and relieved to remember my name, much less get into all the proper protocol of addressing me. (Or proper pronunciation. It's natural for westerners to pronounce Wu as "woo" not "oo")

So people called me "Wu." :-) Or more formally, Ms. Ling.

Clearly, these nice people needed some assistance.

So I went with the pinyin convention of combining the two names into one: Wuling.

Then I started signing my name as Venerable Wuling to help people know how to say hello without my wincing over being addressed as only my teacher should address me. Also, this would help people know how to address other monastics. If I winced at "Wuling," they must have really winced at "Wu ..."

So, bottom line, I spell it "Wuling."