Dear Brothers and Sisters

You are a tree with a root and from the root the trunk, branches, and leaves grow.

Everything you have that you can see are your trunk, branches, and leaves – your job, your career, your money, your property, your reputation, your power, your love life, your family…

Your root is your heart, your mind and your soul, which every the spiritual tradition combines into one word: “heart”.

Most people pay all their attention to their trunk, branches and leaves, and no attention to the root. That is bad and harmful to them – if the root is weak, sick, or dying, the entire tree is weak, sick, or dying.

You need to pay attention to your heart. If you heart is good, everything coming out of it is good.

A good and healthy heart pays attention to the world around it – caring for environment – both physical and spiritual environments, the relationships between it and other people, the responsibility to the community, the constant wish to see the community grow better.

A heart that focuses on itself is selfish, or self-attaching (chấp ngã), which is the source of all evils.

A heart that constantly pays attention to the community of people around it is altruistic, which is the heart of all the saints, and is the source of love and caring, and success, for itself and for its community.

Take care of your heart first, because it is your root. You good heart will bring goodness and good things to you and your community.

With compassion,

Hoành

© copyright 2024
Trần Đình Hoành
Permitted for non-commercial use
www.dotchuoinon.com