My mind can never be at peace.
Since the Buddha and me both know this simple truth,
Namo Amida Butsu comes naturally on my lips.
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There are people who confuse emotional instability with the absence
of faith (shinjin), and so they hope that faith will give them some kind of
constant emotional stability. However, it is normal for unenlightened beings (and
people of faith remain unenlightened until death and birth in the Pure Land!) to
experience various degrees of emotional instability. It is exactly why Amida
urges us to entrust to Him, and not on our own so called, ”personal power” and
"personal achievements or merits". Trully, nothing stable can be
achieved by an unenlightened mind, especially not Nirvana or birth in the Pure
Land.
We must bear in mind that faith will not give us absence of
desires while we are still here in our samsaric bodies. Faith will only make us
enter the stage of non-retrogression, which means that no matter how many
desires we have or how low we are on the scale of spiritual evolution, we will
surely reach the Pure Land in the moment of death.
Thus, an unenlightened person who entrusts to Amida
continues to suffer while still in his/her samsaric body. For a non-Buddha mind
clinging is always present, and so, there
will always be suffering, insatisfaction, and some kind of emotional
instability. I often say this to my Dharma friends - shinjin (faith) is not satori (Enlightenment)! Not even a little satori, so much more a greater satori
which leads to absence of desires and constant emotional stability!