By Living Buddha Lian Sheng, Sheng-Yen Lu

Translated and Edited by TBF Translation Team

During my “spiritual travel”—

I visited again the “Land of Bloodshed.” The spirits found in this place are all wandering lost souls who had experienced the calamity of wars and died tragic deaths from these battles.

This “Land of Bloodshed” is not a small place.

Think about the number of battles fought throughout history and the vast casualties of war. How many citizens were forced from their homes, forced to live in mud and squalor? The blood of those killed could form an ocean and their bones could be piled as high as a mountain. The bodhisattvas witnessing these killings wept tears of heart-wrenching pain.

There was a city where all the people were massacred.

There was an entire ethnic group that was annihilated.

There was an entire country of people that was exterminated.

In this world, there are many “rebellions,” “civil wars,” “invasions,” “combats,” and “world wars.” How can one possibly count how many? How can one possibly count how many casualties and victims?

In times of war and the chaos it creates, cities and countries are destroyed, families are torn apart, couples are separated, mothers and children are made homeless, the innocent are slaughtered, women are raped, young children suffer the pain of hunger and thirst, people run frantically to escape, distressed husbands and wailing wives, children crying in fear and confusion, mothers crying for destroyed families…. Such is a great tragedy of the human world, a cruelty of the highest kind.

(Continued in next issue)

《本文譯自真佛報第454期頭版師尊「真佛論劍」文章「為天下蒼生一哭」》