Set Down the Sack — How Free!

📖Master’s Reading

We often see the ever-smiling Cloth-Sack Monk, always carrying his great sack and telling everyone he meets: "Sack, sack — set down the sack, and how free one is!" This sack symbolizes the formless burdens of life we cannot set down. We often carry several sacks fast on our backs — family, money, love.

Yet life's greatest sack is in fact this "skin-bag" of a body. All our lives, to satisfy the body's eating, drinking, sleeping and passions, we give rise to endless eight sufferings of birth, ageing, sickness and death, making the soul toil forward like a snail bearing its heavy shell. If one forever pursues only matter and bodily need, the soul can never be happy and free.

People are weary often because desires are too many. True letting-go is not abandoning worldly responsibility but learning to "let the mind dwell nowhere," setting down excessive possessiveness of outer things and obsession with bodily desire.

When you are willing to reduce unnecessary clinging and unload the overheavy burden from the heart, you find: letting go was never losing but letting the soul recover lightness. Learn to set down endless want, no longer held hostage by this skin-bag, and life regains true freedom.

🌱Reflection for Daily Life

• One part less desire, one part more freedom.
• Understand that the skin-bag body is the soul's burden.
• Satisfying the passions gives rise to endless eight sufferings.
• Reduce clinging and unload the burden from the heart.
• Letting go is not losing but recovering lightness.