Amitabha Buddha's statement of mourning for this world

Translation

Amitabha Buddha's statement of mourning for this world

When you exist as a human, you may suffer bitterness during this turning of samsara’s wheel but not understand for how many lifetimes. If you know enough to do good deeds, Yama will judge you and give you one lifetime of fortune. If you don’t know enough to do good, you’ll be punished and given one lifetime of want and pettiness. If you carry out evil and depravity, you will be downgraded and transformed into a domestic animal for one lifetime. Your existence just ends up being [an endless cycle of] reaching your end point and then dying, dying and then being reborn. When will you ever get a chance to think in detail upon what is proper or study what is fixed upon the gentleman’s mind? When will you ever get a chance not to commit a host of evils but carry out all manner of goodness? Yet if you are capable of observing the abstentions and receiving the precepts and if you study the Dao of Anterior Heaven and Inaction, of shirking death at the end of life, then you will forever dwell in the Heavenly Halls in utmost joy and you will avoid the miseries and sorrows of the turning wheels of samsara. I regard the Buddhist doctrines and the true words, the host of goodness and the believers all to be valid. (?) So if the gentleman mourns these turnings of samsara’s wheel, he must understand how to carefully carry out these precepts and carefully carry out these undertakings, avoid sinking downward and gradually rising upward to the joyous realm. The only thing he won’t understand is how the precepts and undertakings haven’t yet come to fruition, but repenting only after suffering bitterness is no good.




Amitabha Buddha