Serve the Buddha in All

Since buddha resides in every home, your parents are buddha. So serving your parents is a genuine Buddhist offering. Since buddha lives on every street, the poor and the weak are buddha. So serving them is a genuine Buddhist offering.

The bugs that crawl along below your feet are buddha; watching out for them is a genuine Buddhist offering. The birds that soar above your head are buddha; protecting these flying forms of life is a genuine Buddhist offering.

The immense universes, the endless skies and the planets are all buddha. Sincerely serving these innumerable buddhas is a genuine Buddhist offering.

Buddha is here, buddha is there, buddha is everywhere. There isn't a single place that is not a buddhafield.

And since buddha is everywhere, we have an eternity of incalculable offerings to make. You can find the true joy of living in serving and making offerings to these countless buddhas.

We have a number of ritual implements to use in making offerings to a temple buddha.

But as the Buddha Sakyamuni taught us, we have an infinite number of implements to use in serving buddhas everywhere.

Serving buddhas everywhere is the noble vow of all buddhas and bodhisattvas, and the very basis of Buddhism.

So we should be eternally grateful to the Buddha Sakyamuni for teaching us this noble law, and we should lead a life full of genuine Buddhist offerings.

---Venerable Tong Songchol (1912~1993) One of the great Seon (Zen) masters of Korea---