I'm very down on my luck right now and I'm having a lot of trouble, so I'm going to pray to God, but will I get an answer?
That's a big mistake. God is everywhere. Everything you want and ask for is already God, so if you have a true heart of faith that moves God, all your wishes can be fulfilled. Even if you pray for a thousand days, if there is no truth in your prayers, the divine spirits of heaven and earth are nowhere to be found.
To pray sincerely is to surrender one's life to God. Food is the basis for nourishing one's life. Therefore, offering food is like offering one's life. If you eat three balls of rice at a meal, it is better to eat two balls and offer one ball to God. When you offer this one air, you should keep in mind what you believe in and pray with a sincere heart, and the gods will accept it immediately. The gods have long been said to dwell on the heads of honest people.
He does not accept anything that is tainted, but he accepts the sincere heart. Even if you eat enough and make daily offerings to the gods, they are not pleased, but if you offer the food you eat, they accept your sincerity. If you eat only two out of three airs and offer one air to the deity, and if you offer all your food, not just meat, there is no reason why your wish cannot be fulfilled. If you sincerely pray to the deity for one to three years for a small wish and ten years for a more substantial one, you will surely receive a satisfactory result.
In a place called Sensui-nu-ho, there is a Buddhist monk with great spiritual powers who sits on a rock. On the day of the offering and sacrifice, a man who worked in the temple went down to the village to buy liquor, and on his way back, he wanted to drink, but he thought that he should first put the liquor on the rock, so he poured the liquor on the rock, drank it himself, and then returned to the temple with some left over. When the monk heard this, he was very angry and went into the temple to put the liquor back on the rock, but he heard a loud voice in the air saying that the liquor had already been taken from the rock. The Buddha had accepted the man's heart.
Please explain in a way that makes sense to me since you are teaching us to pray to God every day to build virtue.
If you eat the food on your table every day, it will turn to shit. It is indeed a great virtue to save a little bit of good food and offer it to one's favorite deity, and to give it back to the living. Because it contains the true heart, the deity will be infinitely pleased. Even if the food is meat, it will not be considered unclean, but will accept its truth. What good is a bowl of rice as long as it remains in the air, but to someone who is starving, a cup of rice is life. Therefore, giving is a great mercy and virtue.
If you eat less rice, your stomach will immediately feel relaxed and your mood will be refreshed, so you won't get sick. You will also prolong your life. If you eat three fewer meals a day, you will accumulate one hop's worth of yin virtue per day, over a horse's worth of yin virtue in a year, and six islands' worth of yin virtue in ten years. With this as a foothold, one can naturally rise in fortune. If you don't build up your own virtue in this way, you can't expect to be blessed by heaven.
You said that it is virtuous to value grain, but not to pick it up if it falls to the ground, but if you throw away even a single grain, do you not lose the virtue of heaven and earth?
Even if you value grain, it will fall by itself due to fate. There are also fates in the world that pick up fallen things and sustain life. Therefore, it can be said that you do not cause it to fall, but it falls naturally by karma. Birds get their food from nature, and if they covet human food, they are not birds. Gourmet food is originally the meal of nobles, and frugal eating is the meal of the common people. However, if a commoner tries to eat gourmet food, he will get sick because it is not worthy of his status, and in the end, he will not even be able to eat. This is why it is said that a person who is too proud to live up to his status will not last long, and it is all part of nature's providence.
I'm said to be a practitioner who will rise to power, but I'm still poor and haven't achieved success. I'm also a merchant, so I'm always interacting with people who are rich and in government positions. I think this is the way to attain spiritualization, but I'm not there yet.
Even if a person has a prize to be won, a person who associates with a person of high office will not be able to win it for the rest of his life. If a person of low status associates with a person of high status, they have already lost much of their virtue. In this case, you are already at the top of the heap, and you will not be able to rise for the rest of your life. If you have past merit, you need not be afraid to associate with them, but if you associate with them complacently, without having accumulated any merit, you have lost a great deal of heavenly virtue.
If you want to be truly successful, you should cut off your association with people of high status, interact with the rich with sincerity, treat the poor with compassion, always observe the fountain, and never be arrogant. If you do these things, then go to a fortune teller and ask him to look at your vision again, you will find that it is already quite successful.
Even if a rich man admires you, he does not do so from the heart, but because you are interacting with a person of high office, and such interaction is of no benefit to you and is no different from borrowing the majesty of a tiger.
They say that you are what you associate with, and it doesn't seem logical that I'm not progressing because I associate with people in high places.
A man's heart is shaped by what he puts into it. If you associate with a good person, you become good; if you associate with a nobleman of high status, you become arrogant as if you were a nobleman. If a merchant's heart is like that of a nobleman of high rank, how can he do business? Even when the world is in turmoil, if he neglects his own business and associates with noblemen of high rank, he will not be able to improve himself.
The fortune teller who saw my meditation said that it was a prize that anyone would have nothing to do, but in reality, I am very poor and struggling. Is this not the way it should be?
Contemplation is based on sincerity, and if your heart is not sincere, even if you have good contemplation, it will turn bad. Contemplation is like a living organism.
If you have a reward to be blessed and everyone is blessed, then your practice is dead; and even if you have a reward to be blessed, if you don't have moderation, it's no better than a poor reward. That's why it's called a living creature, and this is the most important part of the Dharma.
For example, even if a prize is poor and unfavorable, if one is moderate, restrained, and cautious, it will gradually improve and become better than one's contemplation.
Also, even if a person receives a wealthy reward, if he is insincere, he will be punished in his lifetime, all because his contemplation changes as his mind moves. That's why I don't talk much about fortunes and misfortunes in accordance with the contemplation method, but rather devote myself to expounding the virtues of the world and controlling the body and mind.
If they say it is good, you rely on it and rejoice in it, thus damaging your virtue; if they say it is bad, you become discouraged and lose the will to do it. This is the custom of ordinary people.
It's also acknowledged that even the most disciplined people feel good when they hear the word "good". For this reason, it is better to stop going to fortune tellers and asking for fortune telling. Instead, you should receive a reading according to your own contemplation and ask how to do it. It is also important to consider your own contemplation as a prize of extreme poverty, and to strive to accumulate the virtues of heaven and earth by practicing moderation, restraint, and prudence in your daily life. It is most important to accumulate the virtues of heaven and earth in any way you can, because even a poor and evil reward can be transformed into a rich and prosperous reward.
The teacher only talks about life and food, and says nothing about the five most important things for us to live (phosphorus, righteousness, yeah, zhi, and god), only that we should eat right.
The Five Virtues are like the branches of a tree. Human beings are based on the virtues of heaven and earth. When one realizes this principle, the Five Virtues are complete. Life is a heavenly virtue. But it is the virtue of the earth that nurtures life.
Therefore, when one comes to know the grace of heaven and earth, one also comes to know the grace of parents. Furthermore, those who have moderation and respect for food will naturally have the five senses.
A great man knows clearly that food determines one's destiny, but a small man makes a big mistake with food, damages his destiny, and ends up in trouble.
You said that contemplation can be good or bad depending on the mind, so I think the best way to contemplate is to ultimately clarify the auspicious and unauspicious, what do you think?
There is the real and the unreal in contemplation. I know the good and bad fortune of all things according to my contemplative method, but I know the reason of heaven and earth at the root of food, and I divine the good and bad fortune according to the season. When a person does not know the auspiciousness of food, they do not know the auspiciousness of food; when they do, they know the auspiciousness of food. In this way, one can prolong one's life if one understands the laws of heaven and earth before others.
Therefore, it is fundamental for a person to know the divisions of all things. The precepts are the precepts of heaven and earth, and they are the virtues of the contemplative path. Therefore, a person who knows the rules can maintain a stable mind and body because his food is fixed.
There are five qi in the heavens and earth, and five dharmas in humans, which play an important role in all things. A person who is not careful and does not understand this is an outcast. Food is the root of nurturing the body and mind, so if you don't eat right and moderate your diet, it's impossible to understand the heavenly realm, which is like having no light on a dark night.
