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What is the bodhisattva path?


The bodhisattva path is a very long journey. Bodhisattvas do not stop at attaining arhatship. They continue to travel the Bodhi path in order to attain complete enlightenment. We can even break the path into different stages. For example, we can break the path down into 52 stages of practices before attaining full enlightenment. Even at each stage, you can break it down into several steps and each step has its own practice. What is more important, is to understand the spirit of the bodhisattva path.

To summarize the spirit of the bodhisattva path, we should consider giving people hope, convenience, confidence, and joy. The bodhisattva spirit is to not let other people suffer. If they suffer, we should do our utmost best to deliver them from their suffering. For example, when you see somebody who needs additional assistance on an issue, you may give your time and effort to assist that person with completing that item, even if it may cause you to become tired, lose some time, or maybe even cause you to get scolded by somebody else. Even if it is that, you still continue to help.

Sometimes this may sound ridiculous, illogical, and counter-intuitive as negative things will be transferred to you instead of the original person. However, this is in fact the spirit of the bodhisattva. By performing this action, the other person will not have to be scolded for not completing the work. It may be minimized as well. You will share the burden. In that process, you gave the person hope, and confidence to complete the item, convenience so that they can save some time and energy, and joy so that they can accomplish the matter quickly.

Let me take the suffering in their place. This is one way you would relieve people of their suffering. At different stages, the form and effect of this process changes. Maybe at the earlier stage, you may take in the blame to prevent two people from being at crosses with one another. Sometimes, we don't even know how to dispel their suffering, and we may feel hopeless at that. However, we should not be discouraged, as we progress along the path, our wisdom becomes more refined. For the same problem, we may dispel the conflict and even allow them to follow the same path!

At the end, walking the bodhisattva path while giving, we can build a harmonious community: a harmonious community in our own minds, a harmonious community between people, families, and communities, and expanding it to a harmonious community in the world.

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