Aspects
One aspect of offering gratitude and repaying is to offer respect to parents, ancestors, and teachers to whom we are all indebted. Another is to avoid unnecessary indebtedness and dependence so that we can act freely. It also involves giving credit where credit is due.
Quote from Dojeon
- It is difficult to serve heaven and earth if you do not respect your parents. Heaven and earth are the parents of humanity, and parents are the heaven and earth of their children. If descendants treat their ancestors badly, ancestors treat the descendants in the same way.
- Dojeon 2:41:3-5
- If you are given a bowl of rice, do not forget it. If you are given only half a bowl of rice, do not forget it. There is a saying, ‘Never fail to repay the benevolence of being given a meal.’ But I say, ‘never fail to repay the benevolence of even half a meal.
- Dojeon 2:40:3-4
- In the Early Heaven, being dependent on others has led people to ruin. You should not even lean on the walls of your own room. Do not wish for the benevolence of others. If you receive many favors, you will be indebted and kept from acting freely. The beast called failure is one-legged. Two of them must lean on each other to walk. When you depend on someone, you are bound to fail.
- Dojeon 8:16:5-7
- Enlightenment is the ultimate way of repaying heaven and earth.
- Dojeon 6:82:5
- You have to discover your own mind and do your own work.
- Dojeon 11:96:8
Read more about this topic: Boeun (Jeungsando)
Famous quotes containing the word aspects:
“Grammar is a tricky, inconsistent thing. Being the backbone of speech and writing, it should, we think, be eminently logical, make perfect sense, like the human skeleton. But, of course, the skeleton is arbitrary, too. Why twelve pairs of ribs rather than eleven or thirteen? Why thirty-two teeth? It has something to do with evolution and functionalism—but only sometimes, not always. So there are aspects of grammar that make good, logical sense, and others that do not.”
—John Simon (b. 1925)
“All the aspects of this desert are beautiful, whether you behold it in fair weather or foul, or when the sun is just breaking out after a storm, and shining on its moist surface in the distance, it is so white, and pure, and level, and each slight inequality and track is so distinctly revealed; and when your eyes slide off this, they fall on the ocean.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)