If my father learned from Buddha earlier

My father was a recognized humble, kind, and good person, but why didn’t he live a long life?

"Yang died of cancer! Did you hear?"

"How is it possible? Yang was such a good person, he was under seventy years old, and he had always been healthy. How could he just leave? Didn’t God bless him?"

The "Yang" they talked about was my father. In the eyes of my colleagues, my father was a good leader with a serious, responsible attitude for decades. In the hearts of his family, he was a filial son and a loving father; everyone who knew Yang said that he was a humble, kind, and good person. However, my father died of leukemia when he was sixty-nine years old. Every time when it is mentioned, everyone sighs like this: "Hey! It is said that good people have good lives, so why did Yang..."

Before I converted to Buddhism, I felt puzzled and I complained from time to time. A kind-hearted man like Father, who had been working so hard all his life, and hadn't enjoyed the happiness of family, left his beloved relatives. Is it true that good people do not live long and bad people live for thousands of years? However, when I started to learn from Buddha, as I gradually understood the principles of equality and unambiguous cause and effect for all living beings, my sympathy for my kind father who had not gotten a good end was gradually unraveled. I clearly realized that my father was indeed a good person, but he broke the precept.

My father has a hobby: fishing. Nowadays, many people like fishing, and it is also called "training to be patient." But among the many sins, killing is the heaviest, and among the merits, not killing is the first priority. H.H. Dorje Chang Buddha III's book “Learning from Buddha,” says, "All living beings have been our family members since beginning-less time. They are the same as humans. It is just that their degree of intelligence and their appearance are different from those of humans. Still, their consciousness is the same as that of a human. That is why in real life we see that some animals can even rescue people, some can do the math, some can sing, and some can dance. I even saw a dog that was able to play a highly difficult piano melody. Moreover, the dog played it very precisely. We must help them and rescue them. Furthermore, we must not even slightly harm any living being. We can only rescue them."

Then, were the fish that were hurt by my father and the earthworms that were used as bait not the same? Haven’t they been our parents, brothers, and sisters in unlimited reincarnation? Instead of repaying them, we unscrupulously hurt them because of pleasures. Imagine the pain when a sharp hook pierces a fish’s body; it dies weakly. This behavior of building one's own happiness and satisfaction on the pain of other lives is not self-cultivation but an extremely cruel deed.

You reap what you sow. Father made a grave mistake because he was hurting fish. If someone makes too many mistakes, the result will make itself known. Even my father, who was good to people when he was alive by doing many good things and making many good choices, was susceptible to these mistakes. But unfortunately, we hadn’t learned from Buddha, so we didn’t know how to stop him from killing the fish.

I was extremely lucky to have met the Tathagata to rectify the Dharma, and met H.H. Dorje Chang Buddha III. I want to cherish the karmic conditions of these millions of lives, not only to be a good person in the world, but also to practice diligently in accordance with the Buddha's teachings, and cultivate good karma in a down-to-earth manner. If humans do good things, they can earn merits, so I hope to give the merits to all living beings; they can learn from Buddha, gain blessings and wisdom. I also hope that they can get away from suffering and be happy.