Chua Duoc Su

To transform obstacles into something happy, you must learn to see them as enjoyable. Then, instead of obstacles disturbing you, you will see them as helping you attain the realization of the path of enlightenment. And that is truly the radical transformation of karma for body and mind.

There is no benefit in admitting that a certain situation is a major obstacle. Because doing so only tortures you and makes you feel unhappy. Once you feel very pessimistic, as if you are living in a dark fog. With the way of thinking that everything you have in your hands is full of obstacles, bad luck, and all the unwanted things. You must immediately know that this is a very wrong way of thinking, because it is just the way of seeing of one of your many minds. From one mind's perspective, it is a problem, but from another mind's perspective, it is an opportunity to develop a virtuous path. Because of ignorance and laziness, you choose to see things darkly, but you can choose other ways of seeing things. From a positive mind's perspective, there is no problem.

Instead of making the situation more painful and more serious, you can choose to see it positively and even enjoy it, knowing that it is supporting you in your actualization of the path to enlightenment. The basic psychology of thought transformation is to break down your misconceptions about problems and instead develop a happy mind that views each problem positively. This basic process can eliminate depression, loneliness, and all sorts of other problems that previously seemed insoluble.

To enjoy the problems of obstacles, you must consider their benefits effectively and comprehensively as much as possible. You must consider these benefits from many angles. There are many different benefits when you know how to transform your mind, and you can reflect on these benefits in detail based on your own experience and wisdom. There are many different benefits when you know how to transform your mind, but here I will introduce you to five ways to transform your mind

1- Use obstacles to cultivate your mind

Unstable problems can bring you joy, encourage you to develop the path to enlightenment so that you are completely free from all suffering and the causes of suffering, by eliminating the seeds of ignorance. Once ignorance is eliminated, you will stop performing actions motivated by delusion, and thus you will no longer create the causes of suffering. Then you can lead all other sentient beings to the peerless happiness of complete enlightenment.

The situations called obstacles will force you to cultivate your mind, to develop your mind. Obstacles or other problems are reasons for you to practice virtue and develop your inner qualities. In other words, obstacles force you to practice virtue, thus allowing you to end all problems along with their causes. It helps you to end not only karma but also each problem along with its causes. You gain this ultimate benefit from karma if you practice virtue, which transforms poison into nectar. According to your capacity and skill, while practicing virtue, you transform karma into peace, so that instead of destroying you, it helps you. Karma supports your development on the path to enlightenment; for this reason, you see karma as a source of joy.

2- Using Obstacles to Eliminate Arrogance

One of the benefits of obstacles is that you can use them to eliminate arrogance, which is the very mind that creates many defects. Every time arrogance arises, it leaves a seed in the mind, and when the seeds become deep, it is very difficult to free the mind from the obscurations to achieve complete enlightenment. Anger, greed, and other delusions are like that.

In the sutras, the Buddha explained the results of pride as follows:

- Ignorant people controlled by pride will be reborn in unfortunate realms. There, they will not have the opportunity to practice the Dharma, and they will be reborn in poverty and have difficulty supporting themselves. They will be reborn in a low status, they will be blind or weak, with a very ugly body and complexion. As a result of this pride, even when you are reborn as a human again, you will still not have the opportunity to practice the Dharma and develop your mind towards liberation or enlightenment.

In the Bodhisattva's Way of Life, Shantideva explains that:

- Those who are troubled by obstacles will give up their pride, and they will develop compassion for other beings who are spinning in samsara.

Terminology:

- Spinning beings refer to sentient beings who are caught in the cycle of birth and death.

The obstacles will stimulate you to develop compassion for other sentient beings who are spinning in the cycle of suffering. And as Shantideva said, the frustration of failure will help you eliminate the pride that always hinders the development of kindness. You can turn misfortune into a blessing by reflecting that if you succeed, you will become even more arrogant, and thus will have to bear all the disadvantages and consequences of pride for many lifetimes in a row. So it turns out that the suffering of failure helps you achieve the greatest success, because it enables you to actualize the path to enlightenment.

In this way, being praised will inflate your mind and give rise to even greater pride. Being criticized will instantly destroy your self-esteem. You discover and eliminate your faults, and through that, you develop your mind along the path of enlightenment. Only then will all your actions of body, speech, and mind become good causes for happiness. One of the benefits of criticism is that it can help you eliminate your faults. Because when you are praised, you feel like you are in the clouds, but then when someone criticizes you, you fall back down. To protect yourself from the ups and downs of emotions, happiness, and sadness, and to ensure a stable mind, remember the problems that come from being praised. And especially the obstacles that being praised creates for the mind, blocking the path of enlightenment. You will not cling to being praised once you are aware of the problems that you have to bear from being praised. In this way, you will have constant peace of mind, and praise will not hinder your attainment of enlightenment.

However, this does not mean that you should not praise others. Praising others, whether ordinary people or enlightened beings, is a good thing. It is best to praise those you do not like, because doing so is a direct counter to your selfishness and arrogance. As such, it becomes a powerful method for developing your mind. When you praise your enemies in front of others, you are giving them the victory and accepting the loss. Praising those you do not like or respect is a direct challenge to your ego, because you often act arrogantly and insolently towards those you do not respect. To praise people you dislike or do not respect requires courage, but it is a very effective way to destroy pride.

When you praise others, especially your enemies, you should praise sincerely, remembering their kindness. You should consider thoroughly that all your past, present, and future happiness is due to the kindness of your enemies. Enlightened beings such as Buddhas always have perfect compassion for you, so they do not allow you to practice patience. Friends and family members who love you do not allow you to practice patience. Strangers who neither like nor dislike you do not allow you to practice patience.

Among all sentient beings, your enemies are the only ones who allow you to practice patience. No one else gives you such an opportunity. Your enemies are the only ones who help you complete and realize the practice of patience, thus enabling you to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings.

You call someone an enemy because they dislike you and are angry with you, and if you were not trying to practice patience, you would not want to have any connection with such people. You see them as a problem, and they appear to you as a problem. However, when you try to practice patience, you appreciate your enemies' unpleasantness. Their anger towards you is a necessary condition if you are to develop patience on the path to enlightenment. Instead of appearing to you as an unwanted problem, your enemy now appears as someone helpful to you, someone who is to be welcomed warmly, because he supports the development of the path to enlightenment in your mind. Thus, he no longer appears as a problem, but as a source of happiness.

You should think deeply about the unpleasantness of any person who has angered you. The anger of your enemy is always persistent, but because of him, you can practice patience, so he not only brings you peace and all the realizations on the path to enlightenment, but also makes you able to bring all other sentient beings the incomparable happiness of enlightenment. Therefore, when you think of his unpleasantness, his harshness, you feel joy from the bottom of your heart.

Even if you offered your enemy mountains of gold or a sky full of diamonds, it would not be enough to repay his kindness. Nothing can compare to the value of the deep peace of mind you get when you practice patience with your enemy. You can never repay your enemy for giving you this peace of mind, let alone enlightenment. This is much more precious to your enemy than any material wealth.

3- Using obstacles to transform negative karma

You can use problems to purify negative karma, the cause of problems, and also to make you careful not to create more negative actions. If you reason from this, problems also make you happy to create good karma, the cause of happiness.

When you experience a problem and find out its cause, you find that the cause is not external but internal. Your problems are created by the negative seeds in your mind, the seeds of ignorance and actions motivated by ignorance. Because the continuum of consciousness has no beginning, you have been accumulating the causes of problems throughout your rebirths since beginningless time. Once you realize this, you will be motivated to practice purifying the causes of problems that you have created many times in this life and throughout your past lives since beginningless time. And you will also be motivated to stop creating more causes of problems from now on.

Obstacles are like a vacuum cleaner that sucks up mental garbage. Through enduring obstacles, you will exhaust your past negative karma, the causes of obstacles, and all your problems. With that positive outlook, you can see obstacles as a source of happiness.

From there, when you encounter obstacles or other difficulties, you can think of the obstacles as blessings for you, which means that the obstacles are helping you purify your negative karma. Whether you are working, practicing in retreat, or studying the Dharma, if difficulties arise in your practice, you should recognize that those difficulties are blessings from above.

Whatever problems you experience are blessings that are helping you purify your obstacles. Instead of experiencing a major disaster, you have purified your negative karma by enduring a small problem. Experiencing a problem is enjoying a blessing, because it purifies many negative karma and many delusions that can cause more problems and obstacles.

How to transform poverty into happiness? It is straightforward, you need to think about the benefits of poverty and the disadvantages of wealth. This will reveal to you that your poverty is a source of happiness because it supports you in realizing the path of enlightenment.

Indeed, rich people have to face many problems and endure a lot of mental suffering. When you think about their lives, your desire for wealth will quickly disappear. Rich people have to worry about protecting their wealth and worrying about getting richer; they also worry about someone being richer than them. The lives of rich people are also full of distractions. They have so much to do and so many sensual pleasures to indulge in that they have no time to cultivate themselves, and this makes it difficult to cultivate to attain enlightenment. On the other hand, if you are poor, you can succeed in cultivating yourself because hardship helps you achieve success in practicing the Dharma. Therefore, the Venerables often say:

- A comfortable life will exhaust the merits created in the past, just as a shopping trip will exhaust the savings of many years.

Living a comfortable life will reduce good karma. Even if you have a luxurious life now, when the good karma of the past is exhausted, your wealth will disappear, and you will have to live a life of poverty. On the other hand, enduring a life of hardship means that you are gradually exhausting your past unwholesome karma, the cause of your present and future problems. In this way, you can see a difficult life as a positive event, thus transforming poverty into happiness.

4- Using obstacles as a motivation for doing good

Obstacles can also motivate you to do good deeds. You must understand that delusions create problems. Once you realize this, you are motivated to transform your mind and develop loving-kindness, compassion, patience, wisdom, and many other good qualities.

Obstacles can make you more determined to maintain a moral way of life, and at the same time urge you to take vows to observe precepts. This is the cause of happiness now and a good rebirth in the future. Experiencing obstacles can encourage you to take vows not to do unwholesome actions such as killing, stealing, lying... These actions are harmful to you as well as other sentient beings.

5- Using obstacles to develop compassion

One of the greatest benefits of obstacles or any other problem is that you can use them to develop compassion, pity for other sentient beings who are suffering in samsara. To fully appreciate this benefit, you must realize how important and precious compassion is. Otherwise, when you hear about problems that help you develop compassion, you may think that it is not important. Compassion is incredibly precious and important, because all your happiness now and in the future, and that of all other beings, depends on your compassion. Once you realize how precious compassion is, you will see how important problems are because they help you develop compassion for others. And so you will have a more positive view of problems and other problems. You will then easily feel compassion for those who have the same problems as you. You will sympathize and want to help those who have the same problems as you, because you know what it is like. If you did not have obstacles, you would not feel this intense compassion. You naturally feel compassion for those who are in the same situation, and you can expand this compassion more and more. This compassion and the desire to help others are the benefits that obstacles bring to you.

In short, you should not only look at your obstacles, but also see all the harms in samsara, in your suffering world. Then you should see countless other people who have the same obstacles as you, who have the same experiences of suffering as pain, suffering due to change, and the Unsatisfactoriness of conditioned states as you. So you should think:

- I am nothing. My problems are nothing. Countless other people are suffering not only this but even much more. It would be wonderful if they were freed from all suffering. I will free them from all suffering.

In this way, you use your problems to develop great compassion. Every time you use your problems to develop great love, great compassion, you accumulate immeasurable merit and purify all obstacles, which are the cause not only of illness but of all suffering. If you have great compassion, great love, you can be happy with whatever problem you are going through.