Studying Theory Is Not Equivalent to Actual Practice and Realization

The Four Noble Truths, the Four Right Efforts, the Four Bases of Supernatural Power, the Five Faculties, the Five Powers, the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, and the Eightfold Noble Path—these are all stages of practice before and after seeing the Path. The Mahāyāna and Hīnayāna are largely similar, with comparable and alike processes of cultivation. If one has not been steeped in these processes, yet a fruit suddenly appears and one becomes a noble one, that fruit is extremely unreliable. Fruits and conclusions can be plagiarized, and all views and knowledge can be memorized—just by reading a few more books, one can memorize them or imagine them.

But these processes cannot be plagiarized by anyone. They are processes that everyone who sees the Path and realizes the fruit must go through. Each person's process may vary somewhat depending on the foundation laid in past lives. For those who already realized the fruit in a previous life, these processes in this life may perhaps be passed through and experienced very quickly; for others, this is not so—they must practice and realize each one by one, and every checkpoint must be passed. The same applies to the Mahāyāna fruits. Once all these processes have been experienced, one's body and mind can be transformed, and at the time of realizing the fruit there will be great liberating merit to be enjoyed.

For those who have not gone through these processes, the fruit they obtain is like flowers in the sky—it can only be admired, with no practical value and no liberating merit to be enjoyed. A plastic fruit is just like this: it can be set out for display, but it cannot fill the belly.

What is called genuine practice is precisely the cultivation content of the thirty-seven aids to enlightenment of the Mahāyāna and Hīnayāna. Apart from these concrete and specific contents of practice, there is no genuine practice. Any cultivation that has only conclusions without processes is not genuine practice, and merely studying theory is not genuine practice. In theory, one can learn up to the theory of bodhisattvas at the various bhūmis; even if one understands those principles, there still lies a duration of one or two incalculable kalpas between that and actual realization. To study now the theory belonging to a time one or two incalculable kalpas hence, and to think one has thereby mastered it and become a noble one, with no need to walk the path ahead and no need to experience and practice the actual processes of cultivation—such cultivation is but a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow, yielding only sky-flowers and bearing an empty fruit.