Treat Your Job as a Way to Temper Yourself: Use Work Experiences to Cultivate and Refine Your Mind and Heart

When I go to work today, I am not working for anyone else. I treat my job as a form of tempering: I refine my mind and heart by working through every situation I encounter on the job. In the past, we only went to work to seek good performance and win our superiors’ approval, didn’t we? The fact is, you only have as much karmic merit as is destined for you. To be honest, whether your superior appreciates you has very little to do with that. Do you believe that?

If you have this karmic merit capacity within you, if you arouse the mind of “it is the mind that makes a Buddha”, if you arouse a diligent, striving mind, and foster wholesome thoughts, you will awaken the karmic merit that is inherently present in your true nature. This merit will naturally benefit you and manifest of its own accord—you do not need to chase after it from the outside. In fact, we used to overstep and do far more than was necessary in the past. Whatever is rightfully yours, you only need to seek it from within your heart—that is the correct path.

We ordinary beings cannot claim to seek nothing at all—that is the state of Arhats. Arhats no longer seek any worldly things; they have become passive. Ordinary people, by contrast, seek recklessly, chasing after everything everywhere, and end up bruised and battered, with nothing to show for their efforts. Mahayana Buddhism also teaches us to seek, but to seek from within our true nature. As long as you calm and settle your mind, life is a process of self-refinement that has nothing to do with others. Whether others appreciate you or not is simply the result of the karmic connections you formed in past lives. Of course, we should not intentionally provoke others.

But what is truly yours is yours, no matter what others do. You do not need to seek it from the outside; you only need to turn inward. You must transcend all phenomena, and cultivate all dharmas. When you arouse a mind of generosity (dāna), you stir up the inherently present merit of generosity within your heart, and you come to benefit from it. When you engage in the practice of moral discipline (sīla) with a mind of discipline, you stir up the inherently present merit of discipline in your true nature, and you come to benefit from that as well.