Here, if standing crops in fertile soil have good activities of life, they will produce fruits with high quality, won’t they? We call the soil, which standing crops are rooted in and which helps the crops harvest well, ‘foundation’. These crops see that the land helps them to ripen. So we can explain that this kind of crop is from that kind of basis.
Then, on what foundation do we, human beings, or our consciousness grow up? It is ‘what is’. In what is, a good foundation for people to make consciousness and the life of consciousness better and to help it attain a good result is a spiritual teaching. There must be food of life. What is this food of life? It’s a teaching. This teaching changes the consciousness for the better or worse. During the process, no matter how good the foundation is, if the consciousness just accepts others’ words without enlightenment the foundation doesn’t make any big contributions to the consciousness or its activities.
Then, why do we have to remember the preciousness of the activity of consciousness? The answer is very simple. The very activity of consciousness is the way of eternal life. Under this condition, whether I myself in the next life or after death can avoid misfortune and go through the good world is determined by what exists in the present world of life. And the position or how brightly I can lead my life is decided by the activity in reality or what is input inside the consciousness.
Thus, once I come to attain good consciousness from enlightenment by studying well, my future will be able to bright endlessly. This thing is what the present Buddhism say. Just one thing, the reason why the Buddhism can’t explain as well as this place is that the enlightened being himself doesn’t deliver his words but other people in the Buddhism are doing so on his behalf. They just tell people short stories and can’t concentrate their teaching on the whole thing because the people in the present Buddhism have karma and so the teaching of the enlightened being is changed in quality. Though the words from the enlightened being really exist in the present Buddhism, people can never understand them. Therefore, we must know how important our conducts of accepting and throwing away what exists are. However, it is never possible without enlightenment. May 3. 1998