Where she held me in her arms one time and said, “Forget me not.”
“In Vietnam, when you go on a journey, you see only Buddhist temples, and every time you go into a Buddhist temple you can see the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. Avalokiteshvara is a person with many, many arms, maybe a hundred, a thousand arms. It may create a strange impression, when you go into a Buddhist temple and see someone sitting with a hundred or a thousand arms. You may wonder why should somebody need so many arms? I will tell you. This person has a lot of love, and the energy of love in her is very great. And that energy needs to be shown in action. When we love, we have to do something, …Therefore, in order to do something, we need to act, and two arms are not enough. We need more than two arms. Look at your mommy. She has two arms. But sometimes she has so many things to do, she wishes she had five or six arms. So many things to look after: the housework is one thing, her child who is crying, her child who needs her, her husband, her family, her father, her mother, her friends, and society, which is asking for her attention as well, the people who are suffering in the world. Your mother has love in her heart, and she wants to do many things in order to express her love, but she has only two arms, and therefore she wishes she had more arms. In her there is a bodhisattva, an awakened being who loves and who wants to do so many things to help the world to suffer less.
Therefore you understand now why the bodhisattva has so many arms, and if you will come close you will see other things too. You will realize that in each hand of this bodhisattva there is something. Look carefully, and you will see that in each hand there is an eye in the palm. Look carefully, every hand of the bodhisattva has an eye in it. Why does it have an eye? Because, when you do something, when you act, you need to do it very carefully, to be sure that what you do makes the other person happy, and doesn’t make the other person suffer. You want to make somebody happy. You really have the good heart, the good will, to do that. You really have love and want to do that. But if you are not careful enough, not mindful enough when you do it, you might make that other person suffer. Therefore, to love is to understand, and the eye in your hand is to be able to look and to understand.”
