Cultivating Your Own Field

by Venerable Sheng Yen

A woman on a retreat I gave said that the more she thinks about her shortcomings and why she can’t get rid of them, the more disgusted she is with herself. She said, “Probably I just don’t have the ability to practice meditation.” As I stood in front of her, the light overhead cast my shadow on the wall. I asked her, “When I am standing still, is my shadow moving?” She said, “No.” Then I walked slowly away, and the shadow followed me along. I walked quickly and the shadow kept pace with me. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get rid of it. Like the shadow that sticks to us, wherever there is a self, there will be problems. But if you were to say, “I want to throw away my ‘self’,” that “I” who wants to get rid of the self is still there. This amounts to the self trying to throw away the self, which is impossible. It would be like trying to get rid of the shadow while your body is still there.

This being the case, is meditation useful? Of course it is, since we can make progress. Wanting to be rid of one’s faults may be a good thing, but practice does not consist in disowning one’s faults because the self would still be there. No, the proper method is to decrease the importance of the self in your life, until it becomes so light that your fault will naturally diminish. We practice meditation not to seek anything but to discover the faults in our character and behaviour. By opening ourselves to self-investigation, we hope to find out where our problems lie. If after searching within ourselves, we can see those faults and problems, then this in itself is the fruit of the practice.

However, you cannot be overly anxious to achieve fast results. According to Buddhadharma, it is possible to become enlightened even in one lifetime. But to completely eliminate afflictions and purify vexations takes three incalculable eons. Since our life is only a few decades long, we cannot expect to attain all that within one lifetime. Perhaps some people may feel: “Well, if I can’t attain it in this life, it doesn’t really seem worth it to practice.” Actually, from the time of Shakyamuni Buddha’s enlightenment, no one else has attained supreme Buddhahood. The rest of us are just following his example, practicing. You should just concentrate on cultivating your own field. Of course you can try to calculate how much fruit you will attain from your labours, but it won’t be accurate, and there’s no need to do that. Just plant the seeds and eventually you will reap the harvest.

What about getting rid of vexations by purposely seeking out suffering and pain? If you have gotten good results from a retreat, that is very good. But even if you just passed the week in pain and suffering, you have still gotten something out of the retreat. At least you are paying off karmic debts. However, I know a practitioner who believed that she could melt away karma by purposely sitting there in pain. She also thought she could melt away other people’s karma by taking on their pain. This is a wrong attitude.

Removing karmic obstruction is not done by purposely looking for hardship. Pain will come by itself; to look for it is misguided. This is like standing before a judge who just sentenced you for a crime you committed. If you slapped yourself in the face a few times and told the judge, “No need for a jail sentence, your honour, I just punished myself,” would the judge suspend your sentence? Striking yourself will not get your sentence suspended. You must still receive legal retribution for your misdeed.

Similarly, it is useless to deliberately punish yourself in order to reduce obstructions. The purpose of cultivation is to train our mind, not to experience suffering. However, in the course of practice, if pain and suffering come of themselves, we should accept them. So, although we should accept suffering as a form of retribution, neither should we seek it out. Otherwise, we may even increase our obstructions instead melting them away.