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How the Teaching of "The Awakening
of Faith in the Mahayana" Changed My Life
In the spring session, 2004, our new Abbess of Buddha Gate Monastery, Ven. Jian Pin, introduced the sutra study class to the sutra on "The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana". She explained that this sutra contained the core understandings applicable to all Buddhist sutras. The sutra was difficult, concise, and required a lot of explanation and discussion to be understood. In Chan Buddhism, the mind is the Buddha, and to realize our mind is to become enlightened. I was very interested in the Sutra because it explicates the aspect of the nonenlightened, deluded mind. In the section "The Aspect of Nonenlightenment", there is a logical explanation of how we become deluded, what it means in a step by step fashion to develop aspects that characterize our defiled state. In this section, I learned that because of being unenlightened, our deluded mind produces the activity of ignorance, the perceiving subject, and the world of objects. Then, conditioned by the world of objects, the deluded mind produces the discriminating intellect, continuity of deluded thoughts, attachment to what it likes, analysis of words devoid of reality, evil karma, and suffering. This is what my mind is doing all the time! Abbess Jian Pin encouraged me to study and memorize this section of the sutra and for this I am most thankful. Studying this sutra has helped me to better understand what it means to be deluded and how delusions arise. When I improve my understanding of how my deluded mind works, I feel that I have more power to make right choices, to avoid taking everything in my mind as real. I understand more clearly that I have the option to choose what I believe in and that I need not believe in and act on everything that arises in my mind. Let those moods, cravings, needs go! In short, studying this sutra is helping me to understand more clearly how to know myself, how to practice more effectively to purify my mind to eventually realize its original nature.
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