Patriarch Yin Guang repeatedly emphasized the need for people to understand cause and effect. Li Bingnan was a student of the master and he too emphasized the need to understand causality. As did his student, Ven. Master Chin Kung, who is my teacher. So I come from a line of Chinese Pure Land teachers who stress that people need to understand that their thoughts and behavior will have consequences.
Everything we think, everything we say and do will at some time come back to us.
Everything.
But there is more.
If I say something and another person acts based on what I said, I’m connected to that action as well. For example, if I tell someone to steal a piece of jewelry and they do so, I am linked karmically to that theft and I will also experience adverse consequences. This is one of the reasons we NEED to understand cause and effect.
Our one action can have a seemingly endless chain of consequences.
And my point is?
Think first before you say or do something.
Consider what the retailing analyst Victor Lebow said after the end of World War II about the US economy: “Our enormously productive economy. . .demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. . .we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”
American business took this idea and ran with it. What are the results? The depletion of the earth’s resources, the extinction of many species, the contamination of our air and water, and the suffering of countless people. Mr. Lebow had a hand in all of this. The consequences he will undergo are truly frightening.
We must learn from this.
We need to be aware that our speech and behavior and can have far-reaching consequences.
We need to think before we speak and act, and then, proceed responsibly and wisely.