First Step of a New Cultivation Path Part 1

As soon as he closed his eyes at the bottom of the lake, the first thing he did wasn't to immediately start creating the cultivation technique but to review his actions in this new life since the beginning because according to Buddha's teachings to become a Buddha is to understand yourself completely.

For the Buddha, ultimate reality is a process of self-realization. Nobody is going to save you. The only person that can liberate you from your own pain and suffering is yourself.

So he started analyzing all of his actions and the first step in doing so was for him to suppress all of his emotions and what he realized deeply unsettled him, ever since he came to this world and reincarnated he was acting extremely unlike his past life.

He even disregarded the Buddha's teachings that you should kill living beings in order to not gain any negative karma, just because of his desire to get stronger and reach enlightenment he committed a massacre against the innocent beast of the surrounding area.

But no matter how much he thought about it he couldn't figure out the answer to why he was acting this way, but just at that moment he again felt the faint whispering of the Heavenly Will, it was telling him that the answer will he should focus on creating the cultivation technique he had in mind and that with that the answer will reveal itself.

Wang Wei was a bit confused about how the Heavenly Will could possibly know this. But then he remembered what he read in the book his ancestor left him.

It was said that all Heavenly Wills of the higher realms were connected to Great Dao, and since everything originates from the Great Dao including all knowledge. That meant that the Heavenly Will was connected to a source of limitless knowledge so it did make sense that it would know how to help him.

So with that in mind, Wang Wei started going over Buddhist scriptures in order to find the core of Buddist ideology and because of his abundant experience and understanding of the scriptures he quickly found out what the core of Buddism was.

He decided that the core of Buddhism was getting rid of the five hindrances, and by doing so achieving nirvana.

The five hindrances were namely the first hindrance sensory desire, also known as an attachment to seeking pleasure through the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and physical feeling.

The second hindrance is Ill-will also know as being prone to feelings of hostility, resentment, hatred, and bitterness towards living beings.

The third hindrance is sloth-and-torpor, which is laziness and half-hearted action with little or no concentration.

The fourth hindrance is restlessness and worry, which is anxiety and the inability to calm one's mind.

And finally, the fifth and last hindrance is doubt, which is the lack of conviction or trust in oneself and others.

The Buddha teaches that to control and detach yourself from the five hindrances is the ultimate goal, but in order to do that one first had to know what the five hindrances really are.

Wang Wei made some headway in that regard and had a working theory that the five hindrances were in fact the flaws of the soul and originated from the soul and that would mean that the core of Buddhism would be the cleansing of those flaws from one's soul.

But the problem that Wang Wei had encountered while trying to devise the cultivation path back in the Celestial Wang realm during all those years was that it was thought to be impossible to sense your soul before breaking through the Nascent-Soul realm.

However in this realm, as soon as Wang Wei thought about trying to sense his soul he immediately felt the Heavenly Will assisting him, it felt as if it was trying to tell him something but as soon as he tried to decipher its whispers he couldn't quite grasp their meanings.

Nonetheless, though a long time passed he still managed to decipher what the Heavenly Will was trying to tell him, it was pointing to one specific place of his body located above his eyes.

In the stories of his old world, it was said that this was the place where the third eye was located, and he supposed that it would make sense that the soul would be located there.

When he started concentrating on that spot he felt something, and after spending an unknown amount of time solely focusing on only that one spot he finally got a clear picture.

It was a completely black space and within that space floated a strange figure, as soon as he saw it he knew what it was, it was his soul.

His soul looked exactly like his body except that it was naked and it was completely made from what looked like glowing blue liquid, when he made that observation, the Heavenly Will whispered to him that it was called spirit energy.

Wang Wei would have been ecstatic if he wasn't currently suppressing his emotions and only using logic, but as it was he felt completely indifferent towards his discovery.

Since that was the case he quickly moved on to try to find the origin of the five hindrances he hypothesized was hidden within the soul. However, when he started looking for them and examining his soul he was still clueless about where they would be hidden.

Except he didn't need the help of the Heavenly Will this time for him to realize what the issue was because he remembered that Buddhist scriptures said that to detach oneself from the five hindrances one first has to be aware of them.

The problem with that was Wang Wei was taking that information too literally, but after analysis, he finally realized its meaning. Because the five hindrances were a part of every human being's soul it was an intrinsic part of it and that meant that there wasn't just a place within the soul that the five hindrances originated from.