Lord Buddha’s Teachings for Lifelong Skill Development of Students

Lord Buddha’s Teachings for Lifelong Skill Development of Students

The teachings of Lord Buddha always inspire us and when we contemplate about his great teachings, we find relevance of these lessons in all walk of our life. The teachings have been guiding force behind a different way of extracting the fruitful conclusions that are highlighted as follows.

1.    Know Yourself: We get across the great message among all messages of Lord Buddha, which very beautifully teaches that “The darkest night is ignorance”. This sentence is powerful that can help millions of young minds all across the world in realizing their potential. The biggest challenge lies in ignorance about oneself. In an interview, a candidate is asked to talk about his/her strength and weaknesses then the candidates that times thinks what actually are the strengths and weaknesses in him/her. So, the billion dollar question is how to identify and know about oneself. Students should identify all your hidden potentials and strengths along with weaknesses also. You are the best judge and observer of yourself and therefore, please know yourself thoroughly.

2.    Portray Yourself: While appearing in an interview; or delivering a lecture in an important and high level meeting; or delivering a talk among renowned experts; or delivering lectures among any other people, many candidates try to portray others as if they are someone else and try to mimic other persons with a thought that this would give better impression in target audience; which is not true. If you know yourself; identify all your strengths and weaknesses; and put all your sincere efforts in combating the weaknesses then you should only try to showcase or portray yourself. You are not required to imitate others.

3.    Take Selfie of your Actions and Thoughts: Everyone, not only students; should practice this” “taking selfie of thoughts and actions thereof”. Selfie has become so popular that people do not even hesitate in taking selfie of very personal moments and share in social media. What is more required is taking selfies of what did we thing the whole day; what did we do the whole day. This can be done every day and its true reflection and introspection would certainly help in becoming better and better. This enables us in lifelong learning skill that can protect against any unprecedented and uncalled for situations.

4.    Uncover Your Potential and Realize It: Most of the times, students are engaged in covering the syllabus and course contents. In fact, what is required is to uncover the syllabus and try to find out the intricacies and concepts within the syllabus. This would help in having fundamental way of understanding and interpreting the things. Similarly, we need to uncover the layers of ignorance from our brain; or mindset and we should allow enough light (appropriate knowledge) to penetrate the darkness and bring out the immense potential which is there in everyone. Swami Vivekananda always used to say “Each Souls is Potentially Divine”. The goal is to manifest the divinity within and therefore one should always learn and practice technical, non-technical, reasoning skill, positive attitude and most importantly and spiritual component of knowledge also.

5.    Respect Your Dreams and Dwell on Present: Lord Buddha always used to say “Don’t dwell on past, but live the present fully even caring for future”. Of course, students must see the big dream and then be focused to honest efforts; dreams come automatically true. Dreams must be seen and with due regards and respect to dreams, one should live in present with humble and sincere efforts towards the goal; responsibility to oneself, family, society and the nation. Respecting oneself means respecting your purpose of life. This will never allow us being not loyal to self, thus be true and honest to oneself and work smartly to achieve small goals of the day or a week. The small goals as an outcome of the honest endeavors would be integrated together and you would see that the biggest dream that you had seen comes true its way.

       The teachings of Lord Buddha helped and suggested me to conceive an idea to contemplate and develop many life skills that would accelerate our story of success and competence. (Please do write for feedback to me at drgrsinha@ieee.org, ganeshsinha@acm.org, gr_sinha@miit.edu.mm).