thanks for sharing this. "the true state of enlightenment"- quite a mouthful. though i think we are talking apples and oranges. although Hsuan Hua appears to be a very evolved person, and probably a nice enough guy, does it really make sense that we should all emulate him, any more than we should all emulate the Maharishi, or Mother Teresa, or pick your saint?
who knows what the world we live in becomes, and what our world becomes with the injection of enlightenment? none of us comes from a recluse or monk tradition, and so there is no template to determine how we express enlightenment in the everyday world. everyone has some idea of how enlightened spiritual teachers act, based on the process of observation you describe. but enlightened people living in the world, who don't want to be teachers? no way. no way at all to assess them. i am not making excuses or trying to justify anything, one way, or the other. just making the point that what works for recluses doesn't work for us. i am not sure there is any commonality at all, any intersection at all, between the things we hear, read, and observe about enlightened monks and recluses and spiritual teachers, and how enlightenment plays out for us average, daily go to work, do the dishes and laundry, go to the movies, type of folks. no template. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "yifuxero" <yifux...@...> wrote: > > ---Precisely! I doubt that there are lots of Enlightened people out > there. > My approach is to select somebody whom I consider to be Enlightened: > Hsuan Hua (I attended his lectures on many occasions and was honored to > eat at the same table as him). > Then, compare his statements with the many "Neo-Advaitins" who also > claim Enlightenment. Then, I use my own powers of perception, limited > as those tools are. > My conclusion is that there's a vast gulf between the "many" Neo- > Advaitins out there and the true state of Enlightenment.: > http://www.advite.com/sf/life/lifeindex.html
