“Blessed are the ones who gets a life in human form wherein every day and every moment is an opportunity to learn and transform self into something great and phenomenal!” Isn’t it so great?
The Pure Land, where there is no sickness, old age, and death rather there is only infinite abundance. Certainly, we want to reach to a state that is beyond the cycle of life and death.
How can we really achieve this aspiration?
Amitabha Buddha shows us the path of liberation through the six Perfections (Paramitas) or the six-syllable mantra we can devote ourselves to and start walking on our path of enlightenment:
The Perfection of Generosity (Dana Paramita)
Generosity is the first perfection and it requires us to share our material resources with others. As a compassionate being, we must utilise the opportunity to help the less privileged beings. However, helping should be our sole motto. Giving back to the world generously not only increases our positive karmas but also helps us in detaching ourselves with excessive materialism.
The Perfection of Ethics (Sila Paramita)
This perfection teaches us from refraining from doing any negative actions that can deteriorate our progress on the path of Enlightenment. There may be immense fascinating opportunities all around us to get involved in negative Karmas, however, we have to always maintain our ethics, integrities, disciplines, and moralities to prevent ourselves from falling into a trap.
The Perfection of Patience (Shanti Paramita)
Patience is our quality of tolerance and acceptance of others. We must work on rising intellectually and emotionally. This will help us in accepting the situations and people as they are and instead of “reacting instantly” to anything we will focus on responding thereby we can avoid the immense negativity around us created by the lower emotions of others.
The Perfection of Joyous Effort / Enthusiastic Perseverance (Virya Paramita)
This perfection refers to the quality of leading our life with enthusiasm and persistent efforts in living the other perfections joyfully. We must accept that everything around is temporary and therefore the limited times we have in our journey can be spend with joy and enthusiasm. The setbacks and issues we face in our day to day lives should be taken as a learning lession of our soul plan and we shouldn’t get too overwhelm by them.
The Perfection of Concentration (Dhyana Paramita)
This perfection refers to the quality of meditation, contemplation, mindfulness, self-awareness. Once we accept honestly and start observing our thoughts and emotions, we can be good friend with our conscious and subconscious mind. This helps in stopping the mind chatter and also giving up the need to control everything around. We dive deep within ourself and strengthen our connection with higher consciousness.
The Perfection of Wisdom (Prajna Paramita)
This perfection refers to the quality of consciousness and perfect wisdom we attain through our own realizations while practicing other perfections and the knowledge we get through the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. With this perfection, we lead our lives with full consciousness and makes great efforts to achieve the ultimate aim of life-Nirvana.
