Only Letting Go Brings Freedom

📖Master’s Reading

We often see the ever-smiling Cloth-Sack Monk (Budai), always carrying his great sack to remind the world: "Sack, sack — set down the sack, and how free one is!" This sack symbolizes the many formless burdens of life we cannot set down.

Each of us often carries several sacks on our back to the death: the burdens of family, children, marriage and wealth. We think fate forces us breathless, without noticing that it is often we ourselves who cannot bear to let go, piling the heavy load onto ourselves.

Seen more deeply, life's heaviest sack is this "stinking skin-bag" of a body. The ordinary being spends a whole life laboring to satisfy the body's eating, drinking and passions, giving rise to endless eight sufferings of birth, ageing, sickness and death. This makes the pure soul toil forward like a snail bearing its heavy shell. If one forever pursues only matter and bodily need, the soul can never be as open and joyful as Maitreya Bodhisattva.

True letting-go is not abandoning worldly responsibility but learning to "let the mind dwell nowhere" — setting down excessive possessiveness of people and things and obsession with bodily desire. When you are willing to loosen your hands and unload the unnecessary burdens of the heart, you find that letting go was never losing, but letting the soul recover lightness. Learn to set down the sack, and life can be truly free.

🌱Reflection for Daily Life

• Understand that life's various burdens are all formless sacks.
• Notice whether you bear the heavy load, unable to bear to let go.
• Learn to let the mind dwell nowhere, setting down obsession with people and things.
• Loosen your hands and unload the burdens, letting the soul recover lightness.
• Letting go is not losing but letting the soul recover lightness and freedom.