ⓒ 2012 Warner Bros.
Even though we do not have a Buddhism belief, we might believe in or are curious about the concept of samsara. Many fictions and films use this as a subject matter to make interesting stories. Cloud Atlas, the recent successful film, has also created a captivating story using the concepts of samsara and reincarnation. In each of the six episodes in the film, actors and actresses play different lives in different manners. Like lines in the film, “Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future;” it is the basic concept of samsara and karma. That’s why those who believe in samsara try to accumulate the kind karma in the present life in belief that they would enjoy a better life in the next life.
However, if you get to know the real meaning of karma, your idea about samsara would change slightly. Karma is ‘an action you commit and the accompanying outcome,’ that is the principle of cause and effect. Where does your action commence? It is actually from your own thought. Your action comes along from a thought in yourself and its outcome becomes your life. However, the thought in you is actually an illusion that does not exist in the world. And thus, the world where you live is the place where this illusion has created. No matter it is the previous life or the next life, if you continue to stay in your mind world of illusion, you will continue to stay inside it. That’s why Buddhism emphasizes that the connection of samsara must be disconnected to achieve Nirvana. The state of Nirvana is to come out from the world that your illusionary mind has made and live in the true world. While staying in the illusionary world, whatever actions you make would not be true. Eventually, good karma or evil karma is just a human conception, that all of your thoughts and actions are mere illusions.
Are you curious about your previous life? Or, have you drawn your next life as you are not satisfied with the present life? I hope it can be an opportunity for you to realize how foolish it is to think of it, through this poem including the precise explanations about samsara. To live in the present is to throw away the attachment to the past; and to truthfully live the present life is actually to live the future. To know it must be your first step to this great enlightenment.
Samsara
It is in each of us to wonder
What will happen to us once we die.
Last night,
One had a dream.
Whether it was a dream of romance
Or that of pain,
Once one wakes up from it the next day
That dream is not real but false.
The dream is false;
It is not reality.
Human life is like a dream,
For when seen from the Creator’s point of view,
Man lives a life that is of his delusions.
For example, he lives with money in his mind, and thus
There can be no reality in this self-centered mind of his.
Reality can only exist for those who have Truth inside them;
Only then would this world be
Buddha-ksetra and true Paradise.
But there is no way that a person
Who is full of delusions would know
The logic that this earth, here, is the Land of reality
Upon which man is to live eternally.
Man’s mind is one of attachments,
And it is one that is not real but false.
Therefore, he will die once he is dead,
For he is as false as a dream.
And it is this falseness that will suffer samsara.
A person who has become Truth
Will live forever in the eternal world,
For he is Truth.
Just like the dreams one has each night,
Samsara is the state in which the whole of one’s life remains as
A dream that does not really exist.
The mind one has lived with is an illusion, just like a dream,
Which is why one’s mind is nothing more than a delusion.
Both Heaven and hell are unreal
When they are of man’s delusions.
But a person who has become the reality
Lives in the real Land as the reality –
As Truth.
A person who lives is one
Who has entered into the eternal Heaven while he is alive.
Truth is just as you see and hear it.
This world and that world are not separate.
Samsara is like a dream.
(From ‘The Living Eternal World’ by Master Woo Myung)
