andyn wrote:Hello all,
I'm a little perplexed when reading this dharma talk by Master Hsuan Hua, link provided below. According to his words, a person who remarried will be sawed into multiple pieces according to the remarried times? And also, a person could be be splitted into multiple mosquitoes? Could someone shed some light on this?
http://www.dharmasite.net/bdh59/whatghostsare.html
Sexual misconduct: In terms of causes and effects, sexual misconduct is the most serious offense. It’s punishment is the most severe. If a married couple gets divorced and each one remarries, then according to the law of cause and effect, their bodies will be cut in half after they die. This is because when they were alive, they had two relationships. So after they die, their karmic retribution manifests. A huge saw slices people in half from head to toe. Their bodies are sawed into as many pieces as the number of offenses they committed. If they were married a hundred times, they are sawed into a hundred pieces, so each of their former partners can have a tiny share of them. What’s so bad about being divided into pieces? If the soul becomes fragmented like that, it’s very difficult to make it whole again. Probably those people won’t regain a human body again for billions of eons. When their nature is split and their souls are incomplete, they become dull and insentient, like plants. When their inherent nature is scattered, it’s hard to become a sentient being again. Even if they became a sentient being, they might be a mosquito. But one human body can transform into 84,000 mosquitoes, and it’s not easy to get all those mosquitoes back into one being. Most of the time, mosquitoes are reborn as mosquitoes. So they bob up and down in the cycle of birth and death, not understanding how to turn away from the dust and unite with enlightenment, or how to renounce confusion and return to the proper. It’s said, "Once the human body is lost, it cannot be regained in ten thousand eons." If you truly understand this principle, how could you not be afraid?
While the effects of sexual misconduct might be severe but even more severe for non-practitioners because they are not backed by their merits. If practitioners have accumulated great merits, the effects of an offense will be lessen. The analogy of putting a handful of salt into the river-the river being merits and the handful of salt being an an offense. The more we practice, the more stable we become as my dad said.