Even though I am not a religious person, I have long been enamored with the phrase “Everyone has a Buddha deep inside their heart.” My ancestors believed that humans are inherently good but that we are composed of animal, human, and godly elements. They believed that the bad within us belongs to the “animal” part of our makeup that is balanced against a kind of divinity that also exists within us, which is the “godly” part of us. When I use the phrase, “Everyone has a Buddha deep inside their heart,” I don’t do so in a Buddhist context but in a universal one, for what I mean is that I believe we all possess sublime qualities within that we cannot fully understand, but that unite us. We are all brothers and sisters. We share a common humanity. We all must eat and sleep, and we all have finitude that governs our lives. While it is true that we all have different natures and different talents, what unites us in being human is greater than the outward things we think might make us different.
We are granted only one life. How we live it is what matters. I believe that we all must find that divinity we possess inside of us. It is our duty to discover the inner wisdom already within us and let it guide us. There, we encounter our inner potential and the empowerment that comes with self-discovery, allowing us to act with compassion and empathy. By finding that Buddha in our hearts, we will learn to draw on our personal fortitude so we may navigate the challenges we encounter.
Don’t Carry Your Dreams (or Your Wisdom) to the Cemetery
Every day on my way to my office, my commute takes me between two cemeteries that line both sides of the road. As I pass them, I realize that, in the historical view, those who have passed on vastly outnumber the world’s living population. We all will die. Pauper or president, whatever our beliefs about what happens after death, we are united by mortality. If there is an afterlife, then might not some of those whom I have studied and learned from—Zhugo Liang, Confucius, Napoleon, Socrates, Nietzsche—wouldn’t they be there as well? Why would I be afraid of being in the company of those greats? I found a way to make peace with living because I found a way to make peace with dying, realizing that we all are connected to something far bigger than our physical world. “As soon as man comes to life, he is old enough to die,” Martin Heidegger wrote in Being and Time. If you recognize death honestly, he taught us, it wakes you up. You stop living on autopilot or just following the crowd. You become authentic! You start caring deeply about what really matters to you, and you start forging your own path to a meaningful life.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I am no better and no less than the next person. But because I was somehow lucky enough to emerge from the hardships of my childhood in rural China in a time of scarcity, I have a sense of responsibility to share what I have learned and what I continue to learn. The lesson I have paid the greatest attention to all my life is that you make the best of what is available, no matter the circumstances. Human development slowly builds one generation at a time. We finish our turn and pass the torch to the next generation. The world is filled with bright people, but only a few focus their talent and build the monuments of their life, their Mona Lisa and their Great Wall. Most get mired in the demands of life and believe themselves too busy to reflect and learn from their experiences, too busy to share any wisdom they have found with others. They carry their most valuable lessons with them to the cemetery. What a waste.
What is available within you is more powerful than you could ever imagine. That Buddha in your heart is present if you truly believe it and search for it. If we can learn to embrace our inner-Buddha, we have the power to open realms beyond our wildest imagination.
Originally posted on Forbes.com