The seventh lunar month comes with the season of gratitude as a traditional beauty of most Buddhists. The bustling season awakens children to pray for peace for their parents by being vegetarian. The season reminds children to wear red roses when their parents are still alive, and to wear white flowers to commemorate the souls of those who have gone to the peaceful paradise.
Early in the morning, as soon as I entered the company, I heard some colleagues talking about vegetarian restaurants, about how to make familiar dishes from vegetables of the mothers at home. Some invited me to go to the temple to pray to Buddha after work to wear flowers. Roses for parents, yellow flowers for those who are still alive and those who have passed away, white flowers for those who have lost both parents. The stories about parents were buzzing again. The old stories were brought up and pondered. There were also some who were married and had children, beginning to understand the worries, the worries, the sacrifices, the thrift for children. The story went around and around, the young colleagues looked at each other and concluded: filial piety is not just a season.
Filial piety is not just a season, a day or a moment of the year or month. Parents give birth and raise their children until one day when they are fully aware, spread their wings and struggle into life to make a living, know how to see, know how to think; know how to turn stone into gold, know how to grow moss; know how time turns cruelly, then that is also the time when time turns gray on the hair stained with wind and frost. Time leaves bird marks on the faces of parents. When suddenly seeing the season of gratitude, their hearts are filled with longing. Just looking at each other, they tell each other how heavy filial piety is!
The time of young people can be miles and miles of roads, but the time of their parents is all focused in one direction. Towards their children. Children who are eager for so many fun times with friends, so many times coming home late, so many long trips to explore, so many relationships to cling to. In fact, they always insist that their hearts are like that and sometimes they refuse family gatherings; many times they are grumpy and irritable when their parents keep asking them the same thing; many times they come home late, drunk, not knowing that their parents are waiting for them all night long…
Filial piety is just one word but its meaning is very broad. For parents, sometimes joy, success, or peace and comfort, or simply the child returning safely after a day of hard work on the streets is happiness. The happiness of the elderly is sometimes only calculated by the day, by the hour, because no one knows when the leaves will fall, sometimes all it takes is a gentle breeze. Therefore, complete filial piety is not about fasting, nor waiting for the day to put on flowers, filial piety is the daily actions that let parents know that their love for their children is reciprocated appropriately.
Sometimes young people still bring filial piety to social networks with luxurious travel photos, with luxurious restaurant meals, with valuable gifts for their parents. They enthusiastically think that it is the practicality of a child's duty. Filial piety suddenly attracts hundreds of thousands of likes, countless shares. Unfortunately, the technology era is like a stimulating game for young people to fall into a search for illusions and fame. Filial piety is sometimes very simple! It can be just a full meal with children with familiar dishes in the old house that warms the parents' hearts. It can be the act of making a cup of coffee in the morning for dad, buying a shirt for mom, finding the morning newspaper for dad, finding a book for mom. Or maybe sitting on the porch listening to parents tell old stories about themselves and their children. Listening to parents complain about the hardships and poverty of those years. Then seeing parents smile at our maturity today. Old people live on memories. Those memories, whether sad or happy, are in their blood and flesh. Those memories are the things we remember forever and one day those white clouds will fly back to the sky.
The seventh lunar month is filled with vegetarian days and flowers worn on our shirts, but we don't need to wait for the month of gratitude. Let's try to start with the days we sit with our parents, see in their words, find in their smiles the peace that shines in their eyes. Those are the most complete days of filial piety.
Article: Tong Phuoc Bao
Illustration: Document
