Highlight:~

During the 3-day retreat, Master tells stories about Shakyamuni Buddha, and happens to find this story named “Merits of Becoming a Monk”. It’s about a one-hundred-year-old man who wanted to follow Shakyamuni Buddha and become a monk for the merits of it. Knowing his past karma, Buddha helped him attain arhatship in an instant.

If one allows his son, daughter, servant or his people or even himself to become a monk or nun, he will have boundless merits. Compared with the merits of giving, the merits of becoming a monk on our own or allowing our relatives and anyone related to us to become a monk would be much more than the merits and worldly and heavenly reward of continuously giving for ten life times.

Buddha once talked about the merits of becoming a monk: “a monk or nun takes the scriptures as water to wash away his karma and wrong conceptions and to get rid of sufferings of birth, aging, illnesses and death of life, thus eatablishing affinity with Nirvana; he or she uses precepts as steps to go nearer to the solemn pure land every day, and as eyes to observe  good and bad in the world and walk in the right way, thus going directly to Nirvana. So allowing oneself or others to become a monk or nun have boundless merits.”