Deepest gratitude to Namo Shakyamuni Buddha!
Deepest gratitude to the Greatly Merciful and Greatly Compassionate Guan Yin Bodhisattva!
Deepest gratitude to all Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and Dharma Protectors!
Deepest gratitude to Master Jun Hong Lu!
It’s a great pleasure to be given this opportunity to share with all of you what I have learned on my journey of Buddhist practice. Before I start, I would like to seek forgiveness from Guan Yin Bodhisattva and Dharma Protectors if my sharing today is improper in any way.
It’s been nine years since I started practising Guan Yin Citta in 2015. To say the least, it has been a fruitful journey where I bore witness to the dramatic transformations in various aspects of my life, namely, career, family life and my child’s education. For the purpose of today’s sharing, I would like to focus on how Guan Yin Bodhisattva helped me get out of my financial plight, allowing me to find my way out of the lowest point in my life.
Sometime in mid-2019, I lost my job following a headcount reduction exercise at an exhibition centre that I was attached to. For the ensuing six months, I struggled to secure a job. Not wanting to remain idle, I cast my net as wide as possible and I had even explored making a career switch into other fields such as e-commerce. I was all geared up to launch my own digital marketing consulting services – something that I used to do in the past – as my side business, and concurrently, import some products from China to market them online. In fact, I was all ready to execute my plan in February 2020, right after the Lunar New Year.
As the saying goes, ‘Man proposes but God disposes’, in March that year, the Chinese government imposed a lockdown on the heels of Covid-19 pandemic, and enforced cross-border trade restrictions. This dramatic turn of events threw a spanner in the works and my e-commerce project was canned. As fate has it, very soon after, the Singapore government rolled out its version of island-wide lockdown (termed as circuit breaker), plunging the economy into a halt. Scrambling to come to terms with the harsh economic realities, small and large companies alike started to scale back their spending. At that time, no company would want to spend on advertisement and retrenchment was the name of the game. As for me, my plan to venture into other businesses, as a stopgap measure, looked bleak.
If it were just me alone, it would have been fine, but I have a wife and a child to feed. Stuck in a quagmire, in the depths of my financial mess, I was literally staring at less than 100 Singapore dollars in my bank account! To make ends meet, I decided to take up a bank loan to sustain my family but even then, the amount was hardly sufficient to keep us afloat. Eventually, I bowed to my fate and mustered the courage to seek financial aid from friends and relatives. This was when I witnessed the inconsistency of human relationships come into play. I would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to my uncle for extending a lifeline to my family and I when we most needed it.
Going without a stable income for one-and-half years, having to remain idle at home, and having nothing to keep me occupied, I had no idea back then how far the tunnel extended. At the back of my mind, I kept asking myself, “When would the pandemic end? When will I find a job?” Quoting a yesteryear’s idiom, “It takes a penny to break a hero”, I would have to admit that one has to be broke to fully understand this distress. Unable to see the light at the end of the tunnel, each passing day was an agonising one. Were it not for the blessings of Bodhisattva, and my Buddhist faith, I would have collapsed under this pressure. All I could do was to perform recitation and pray for Bodhisattva’s blessings every day to let me secure a job as soon as possible to turn around my financial situation.
I completely agree with Master Lu when He says that sexual misconduct is the cause for one to suffer the retribution of financial loss. Admittedly, the career disaster that befell me can be traced to sexual transgressions committed in my past relationships prior to my Buddhist practice. Hence, I decided to make the vow to recite 108 times of the Eighty-Eight Buddhas Great Repentance (LIFO) each in 10 batches as a means to repent my once licentious lifestyle.
Towards the end of 2020, around the time when I was at the tailend of my recitation of the first batch of 108 times of LIFO, my teacher got me in touch with a potential job opening. I tried to follow-up with them several times and eventually, the company decided to create a new position for me. The pay might have been 60% lower than my last-drawn salary, but given the harsh realities that were staring right at me, I couldn’t be more grateful to Bodhisattva for granting me a job so that I could feed my family!
It so happened that around the same time, a fellow Buddhist practitioner shared with my wife that performing life liberation is one way to improve one’s financial position, and to make it efficacious, one should make a vow to liberate a sizable number of fish and the fish should be released over many occasions. With the advice in mind, I made the vow to liberate 10,000 fish. Unable to do it on my own due to the ongoing pandemic, I engaged someone to do it for me on a weekly basis.
Half a year later, to my surprise, a Human Resource manager from a technological innovation company got hold of my resume online and invited me for an interview. The company eventually offered me a job with a salary that matched my pre-pandemic salary level. At last, I was able to start saving and paying off debts! Deepest gratitude to Guan Yin Bodhisattva for blessing me! My wife said that since the Bodhisattva had given us so much, we should also do something to help the Practice Centre and others. So, in January 2022, I joined the Practice Centre as a volunteer.
Soon after, a hiring manager of a multinational cybersecurity technology company saw my online resume and invited me for an interview. Competition for the job was intense, with hundreds of applicants. I went through a total of 10 rounds of interviews and I was not too hopeful about it.
During this time, I had a dream. In the dream, I was ascending to heaven to settle some matters. In the distance, I saw the backs of the three Bodhisattvas of Fortune, Prosperity, and Longevity. Thereafter, a young man, who worked in a bank, and I were taking an elevator. In the dream, I knew that this young man was Sudhana (Good Fortune Heavenly Boy).
Two months later, I was hired! Guess what, I received an 80% pay raise, and was granted an employee share option scheme. That said, nothing beats the unlimited leave, which can be taken at any time, that I am entitled to, and the flexibility to work from home. What an ideal job!
However, the new job came with a new challenge. It came to my knowledge that one of my fellow co-workers had been eyeing my position. In fact, when I joined, he had hinted to me that he had hoped that I would not take up the offer. Not surprisingly, he was fond of picking on me from day one. Being new to the job, there were many aspects of the work that I was unfamiliar with and as expected, he wasn’t the most helpful. Even when I sought help from others, he would take the opportunity to oppress me which included painting the picture that I was a fool in all our meetings.
It goes without saying, I was under immense stress at work. My sleep became disrupted, I lost my appetite and my mental state started to deteriorate. The mere thought of having to return to work was downright torturous. This was when I decided to make the vow to recite 10,000 times of the Medicine Buddha Dharani. I prayed to Bodhisattva so that I would not be affected by this negative energy. Six months into the job, I relented and confided to my wife that I had reached my breaking point and planned to quit my job in March 2023.
Soon after, my wife dreamed of three puppies at home, the first puppy was docile, while the other two mischievous, of which one of them urinated on my laptop. Master Lu once said, “How a dog behaves towards us in our dreams represents our relationship with people around us in real life”. Through the dream, I could immediately connect it to my relationship with my three fellow co-workers, especially the part where the puppy urinated on my laptop. I finally understand that when we are the target at our workplace it is all because of the karmic grievances with one another.
Had this happened prior to my Buddhist practice, I would have fought and confronted him head on. But, I remember what Master Lu taught us, “Use patient forbearance to quell karmic grievances”. Hence, whenever they went against me at work, I would still present my views objectively. To resolve the karmic grievances between us, I made the vow to recite 2,000 times of the Mantra to Untie Karmic Knots and nine Little Houses. Sometime in February 2023, just one month before my planned resignation, my colleague quit his job. I definitely did not see this coming! Deepest gratitude to Guan Yin Bodhisattva for helping me resolve this negative affinity and let me keep my job.
Over the past two years, I have put the staff benefit of the unlimited leave days to good use by participating in various dharma propagation activities to neighbouring countries organised by the Practice Centre. On top of this, I have also cleared my debt. I couldn’t be more grateful to Guan Yin Bodhisattva and Master Lu for Their blessings!
Had I been told at the beginning of 2020 that my salary would jump by three-fold in three years, I would have laughed it off. Had it not been for the blessings of Guan Yin Bodhisattva, it would not have been possible for my career that had hit rock bottom to rise to such heights and so smooth sailing. Deepest gratitude to Guan Yin Bodhisattva!
The ups and downs of life have taught me an invaluable lesson that whatever the circumstances I am in, as long as I follow in the footsteps of Guan Yin Bodhisattva, Master Lu and Guan Yin Citta, I will have what it takes to face up to all the impermanence of life as well as whatever curveballs that life throws at me.
In times of hardship, we must always think of Guan Yin Bodhisattva. When fate closes a door, it opens a window – this resonates with the traditional Chinese saying, “Heaven never bars one’s way”. Regardless of how torrential the rain is or how long it has been raining, we must have faith that the day will come when there will be clear weather. As long as we wholeheartedly apply Guan Yin Citta’s Five Golden Buddhist Practices, Guan Yin Bodhisattva will lay out the best arrangement for us and bless us with a safe and smooth journey ahead.
Deepest gratitude to Guan Yin Bodhisattva for Her compassion and blessings. I shall now make the pledge to be single-minded in my practice and never backslide in my practice. I will uphold Singapore Guan Yin Citta and Practice Centre, following in its footsteps to take the propagation of the teachings of this dharma door to greater heights.
This wraps up my testimony. Thank you all for listening in.
Source: Fellow Practitioner Han from Singapore
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