Be Real and Live Your Best Life - Four Zen Gates
I’m going to talk about an old Buddhist teaching and see if I can tie to our everyday life and find meaning in it for us. This is the teaching of the four gates. It’s from Zen Master Bodhidharma. He listed these four things that he thought were important to us as we start on the Buddhist path. I’m going to go through these one by one.
Retribution of Enmity; in our lives we need to realize when we’re wrong. We need to admit our flaws and not lie to ourselves all the time, because we do lie to ourselves all the time. We’re often when think about ourselves either lifting ourselves up and pretending we’re better than we are or tearing ourselves down and thinking very lowly of ourselves. We rarely see ourselves clearly. When we do something wrong we need to admit it and we need to try to make it better. We need to try to be better. I’m trying to learn how to stop saying I’m sorry and instead say “I will do better.” Because when you say, “I’m sorry,” you’re sort of putting an expectation on the other person to say it’s okay. We should try to forgive people, but also we should focus on trying to be better rather than trying to get forgiveness so that we don’t have to apologize again.
Acceptance of Circumstances; equanimity. Our ability to weather the storms of life. To be moderately content with whatever is happening. Sometimes we really let life tear us down, over big things and small things. We’re talking about accepting things and having an even mind, not falling apart when things go wrong. Sometimes one bad thing goes wrong and it ruins everything for us. In Buddhism we often call that equanimity. Sometimes we call it patience too. We’re talking about keeping an even mind with whatever is happening because the truth is life is going to kick us all the time and we need to learn how to accept things.
Absence of Craving; we shouldn’t be giving in to all our temptations all the time. Be mindful of what we’re doing and know when something is not a good idea. I have a habit of giving in to my temptations all the time and that’s something a lot of people struggle with. There’s all sorts of temptations. We might eat all our kids Halloween candy. Or drink too much (alcohol or soda) there’s so many ways we can overconsume and give in to craving. Sometimes we feel like there’s a hole in us that we need to fill. We crave all sorts of things and we pursue them too much. We even think about sex too much. That’s a craving too. We have all sorts of cravings and Bodhidharma is telling us we need to learn how to manage that and not get carried away with our cravings. We’ve all had the experience where we know we shouldn’t indulge something, but we really want to so we do it anyway. I think we can all relate to that. Bodhidharma is telling us we need to reign that in. We need to make the best choices we can instead of giving in to our temptations all the time. Think about what you’re doing and don’t over-do it.
Act in Accordance with the Dharma; to us this line might not resonate very well. So, with all respect to Bodhidharma I want to paraphrase that and say “act to be real” when he talks about being in accordance he’s talking about living our best life and seeing the way the world is and learning about our place in it. Being more aware, attentive, mindful and honest with ourselves. The Dharma is sort of the correct way of reality, of letting life unfold as it should. We should be real, fully real. In a world full of people that are lying to themselves and lying to others and not being authentic, we should be real and genuine in all our relationships and in all our situations. I like to say that is the core of what Buddhism is all about. It’s about being real because it’s very easy to not be real. It’s easy to be fake. So let’s be real.
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