Born for Perfections
October 05, 2024
Close your eyes and be sensitive to your breath. Notice when the breath is coming in, know when the breath is going out—each time it comes in, each time it goes out. And allow it to be comfortable. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change. Make it shorter, more shallow. Heavier, lighter. Faster, slower. Try to see what kind of breathing feels good for the body right now.
Whenever there’s a birthday, it makes you stop and think: Why were we born? The short answer is we were born because we wanted to. But then ask the next question, well why? What did you want out of life? The Buddha has you stop and think: What would be the best thing to want out of life?
Look at his example. He was born for the sake of the paramis, for the sake of his perfections: generosity, virtue, endurance, wisdom, a long list of good qualities. It was because of those good qualities that he was able to find success in his endeavors, to find happiness. So if you want to find true happiness, you want to devote your life to developing the paramis, developing your perfections: being generous, being virtuous, learning powers of endurance.
We like a birthday blessing that says, “May you meet with nothing but happiness, nothing but ease.” But if you meet with nothing but happiness and ease, what kind of person do you become? Very lazy, very complacent. You get used to things happening your way. You don’t develop much endurance. You don’t develop much determination.
A real blessing is that whatever happens in life, may you have the endurance to deal with it, the goodwill to deal with it well, and the wisdom to deal with it wisely. Because what’s important in life is not what comes at you, it’s what you create and what you send out into the world. So look at what you’re doing, what you’re contributing to the development of your own mind and the development of the world around you. That’s a good use of your life.
We use the meditation here as a foundation. It gives you the strength you need to deal with difficult situations because you have a sense of well-being inside that you can create in any situation, no matter what the circumstances. That provides you with a source of strength. And then from that strength, you can build all the good qualities you want—such as goodwill when you need goodwill. Think about it—when you have goodwill for others, it’s not basically wishing “May you be happy whatever you’re doing,” because a lot of people are doing a lot of very unskillful things right now. You don’t want them to keep on doing that. What you really want is that they understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them. That’s a wish you can have for anybody.
So think about what it means to develop good qualities in the mind. And look at your own mind and see which qualities are lacking. You can devote the year to making up the lack. In that case, the blessing would be, “May you be able to do that with happiness, with wisdom.” That way, the fact that you were born will become a gift to yourself and to the people around you.