Each year at the Annual Conference you explain the duties and responsibilities of assistant teachers, Dhamma servers and trust members. Kindly touch on these points once again so that all three groups can perform their duties in the right spirit. Whether one is a Dhamma server or managing the organization as a trust member or serving as a Dhamma teacher (junior assistant teacher, assistant teacher, senior or teacher), it makes no difference; one is serving people. The motivation, the whole aim, should be to serve people without expecting anything in return. Expecting any kind of monetary gain is out of the question and is totally against Dhamma. No-one should commercialize Dhamma; otherwise it will be degraded and get spoiled, it will not remain Dhamma. But even expecting some kind of honour or respect from others is also prohibited. You serve without expecting anything from others.You already get so much when you see people benefit from the technique. People come to courses with so much melancholy and sadness on their faces. And after ten days you find them leaving with blooming, bright faces. You feel so happy that you have given good service and that people have benefited so much. Later on when you get word from them that they are continuing to benefit from walking on the path you feel so happy. This is your reward, and a very good reward it is. The pāramī that you earn, the merits that you gain, will benefit you. Don’t expect anything else from the students when you are serving.And while serving in any capacity, a feeling of gratitude should develop within you. Never expect others to have gratitude toward you, but you yourself must be developing gratitude as well as great respect and devotion toward the Enlightened One. Buddha took great pains for us. For aeons and aeons he kept on developing his pāramī, making efforts to discover this wonderful technique which had been lost to humanity. If he had not taken those pains how would we have got it? So a feeling of gratitude should develop towards him. What’s more, if he had decided not to teach others after becoming enlightened, how would we have received it? But out of infinite compassion he kept distributing this technique throughout his life. A boundless feeling of gratitude should develop towards the Enlightened One.And then from generation to generation, from teacher to pupil, right from the Enlightened One to Sayagyi U Ba Khin the technique was maintained in its pristine purity. We should have a feeling of gratitude towards all of those who preserved the technique. Though it went to other countries, eventually it was lost, as happened in India. However, people in Burma, although few in number, maintained it. We should have a deep feeling of gratitude towards them. Otherwise how would we have received it?This feeling of gratitude is a very important quality indicating that a person is developing on the path. Serve without expecting anything in return and see that gratitude is ever increasing in you.Now, amongst yourselves, whether one is a server or a trust member or a teacher, one should not generate ego. Not the ego of feeling, Now I have become a teacher, nor the ego of feeling, Oh, I am just a lowly Dhamma server. You are all serving, just serving in different ways. The whole aim, the whole idea is just to serve people. So you should have good feelings towards each other. If this feeling of goodwill is missing it will set a bad example. It shows that you have not understood Dhamma very well at all. So always keep this in mind: In whatever capacity you are serving the aim is just to serve suffering humanity, that’s all - SNG @ vridhamma.org/uploadedfiles/BenefitofMany.pdf
Posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 10:13:11 +0000
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