Kindness

Being kind means being willing to help others and liking to help others. This runs against the natural human instinct of selfishly looking after oneself first. A kind person is one who naturally tends to like helping others.

To change from the instinct of liking to look after oneself into the tendency of liking to look after others is a long road of cultivation going back many lifetimes. If each of us looks closely at our own mind, we will see that it has no ready-made tendency to like helping others. Someone has to call on us, rally us or remind us before the thought arises to help those in difficulty, and then only for a while. Ordinarily we do not trouble ourselves about looking after anyone.

We understand that if we lived beside a kind person, our life would be very happy. That person would help us when we needed it. That person would shelter us when we were bullied. That person would be glad when we succeeded. That person would comfort us when we failed, and would not even hate us when we made mistakes. If there were many kind people around us, how happy our life would be.

Thinking like this is right. But we must think further. Do we need to live kindly with everyone in that way? What shall we do so that everyone living in the world is kind to one another?

We need others to be kind to us, and they too need us to be kind to them.
Two or three people being kind to each other is not yet enough to make this world happy.

First of all, we ourselves must be people who live kindly with everyone. Then, from a genuine, long-standing life of kindness of our own, we call on everyone to live kindly with one another.
We tell ourselves: let us live kindly, let us like to help others. We pray to the divine being we worship to give us the tendency to be kind so that we like to help others. We often praise and admire people who know how to live kindly, so that the law of cause and effect builds the tendency to kindness in our heart.

This world is a mixed environment of good and bad people. This world is an opportunity for us to fight between evil and good in our own heart, after which we will go to a world that has been sorted. If goodness occupies our heart, then after death we will be born into a place full of holy, good people living happily. If evil occupies our heart, then after death we will be born into a place full of wicked people living in torment. Such is the fairness of the universe.

In this world where good and evil are mixed, if we affirm our stand with the path of goodness, we have passed the great admissions selection of heaven and earth. We are chosen to be taken to the world of the holy and good.
In this world where good and evil are mixed, if we persuade still more people to take the path of goodness, we become a person of great authority and virtue, roaming freely through the realms of the heavenly beings.

At first, having just begun to live kindly and managed to help only a few people, we feel it is very hard and tiring. After a long time of living kindly with everyone, we suddenly realise that being kind to others is in fact our own happiness. Though living kindly costs us time, effort, money and mental energy, in return, when we live kindly, when we manage to help others, when we bring others peace and joy, we already have joy. Having understood this, we will always be kind people, always liking to help others. And above all we will call on everyone to live kindly with one another.