15/11/2024
“How to Reflect on Your Own Merit
Here’s how to recall and reflect on the merit you’ve accumulated. We have guidelines – the 10 Perfections (Paramis) and 10 Meritorious Actions as references. We can gauge our actions to these accordingly: which category do our deeds fall into? For example, which category does encouraging others to do good deeds fall into? Reflecting on our deeds will allow for us to feel blissful and joyful.
At first, we might not be skilled at this reflection, but with regular practice, it becomes easier and more natural. Each time we reflect, we’ll feel more joy and blissful happiness.
Everything we reflect on will be summarized on our final day before we leave this human body that we’ve used to build our perfections, as we journey to the celestial realms.
The more we reflect, the more joy we feel. The more joy we feel, the more merit grows. Our merit sphere expands and our divine treasures increase. We live in the human world briefly, but in the celestial realms for an extremely long time – sometimes for multiple Buddha eras (Buddhantara) or even multiple cosmic cycles (Kappa).
This means we remain through multiple cycles of worlds arising, existing, and dissolving. We might exist through the appearance of multiple Buddhas – one, two, or three Buddhas may come and go while we remain.
Therefore, in this life, we are fortunate to have encountered Dhammakaya wisdom, discovered by Luang Pu (Great Master), who brought the technique forth as evidence of the Buddha’s enlightenment and passed it down to us. We are very blessed and we must use what we have now to accumulate merit and perfections.
Once we leave this physical body, we lose the opportunity. It will be too late for regrets, and others can only help us minimally through transferring merit to us, which gives much less benefit than creating merit ourselves.”
Luang Por Dhammajayo