Lama Zopa Rinpoche
The hardships we experience in practicing Dharma are completely different from those generally experienced by people in the world. Look at them. Ordinary people experience hardships—difficulties of body, speech and mind—day and night, all the time.
Why do they experience all these hardships day and night, working from one Sunday to the next? Check up. All the work they do and all the tiredness and other sufferings they experience are to obtain the temporary happiness of only this life.
There is no thought of obtaining the happiness of future lives or the ultimate happiness of liberation or enlightenment. There’s not even a single thought of that. All they think about is the small, temporary happiness of only this life—of a few years, a few months, a few days. That’s all. You can see that their whole life from beginning to end is spent on that.
Even though they spend this life in that way, it would be different if they had some success and happiness, some peace in their mind. But, no, they don’t.
In fact, they experience all these great hardships to continually circle in samsara, to accomplish works that will again cause them to be born in the lower realms and experience the resultant suffering. Again they will have to be reborn in their previous home, the lower realms, and experience suffering, the result of those negative karmas.
This doesn’t happen only in the West; it is also similar in the East. Even around Lawudo, the Sherpa people don’t have time to practice Dharma. When you think of this, it makes you cry. When you see how sentient beings are suffering in samsara, it really makes you generate compassion.
There is a big difference in the way we experience difficulties and suffering to practice Dharma and in our reasons for doing so. The advantages that we receive from this as a Dharma practitioner and the advantages that those who don’t practice Dharma receive are complete opposites.
Worldly people experience difficulties for a completely useless purpose in the end. All their difficulties cause them to accumulate negative karma. There’s not a single result of happiness or peace from that, just misery.
The hours of hardship that we experience practicing Dharma have so much advantage, granting us both temporary and ultimate results.
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Realizations come when we purify our defilements; otherwise, realizations don’t happen. The more we purify, the more realizations come. It’s like with a mirror: the more dirt you clean from the mirror, the more reflections come in it. Our mind is like a mirror. As we clean the mirror of our mind, it’s able to give more and clearer reflections. Like that, realizations, including enlightenment, come.
