The Cultivation and Realization of the Buddha-Dharma Requires Immense Wholesome Roots and Merit

The Buddhadharma is difficult to realize and difficult to cultivate, requiring sentient beings to cultivate for three great immeasurable kalpas. If the Buddhadharma were easy to understand, easy to realize, and easy to cultivate, sentient beings would not need to cultivate for three great asaṃkhyeya kalpas in order to perfectly accomplish the Buddha Way. If the Buddhadharma were easy to understand, the Buddha would not have emphasized that sentient beings need a considerable degree of good roots, merit, and precepts, meditation, and wisdom. Some people have read the Tripitaka and the twelve divisions of the scriptures five times, yet never touch even the edge of the Buddhadharma, and cannot even glimpse from afar the shadow of awakening to the Way. Sentient beings have been deluded and inverted for immeasurable kalpas, immersed in worldly dharmas that are false and illusory; it is truly not easy for them to understand the profound Buddhadharma.

The Buddha taught the Dharma for forty-nine years, yet at the time of His parinirvāṇa, there were still countless sentient beings who had only a half-baked understanding of the Buddhadharma, and some did not even have that. It was precisely because Ānanda saw how foolish and difficult to teach sentient beings were, and how they misunderstood the Buddhadharma, that he had no choice but to leave the Sahā world himself one hundred years after the Buddha's parinirvāṇa—although, relying on his meditative concentration and merit, he could have remained in the world for a very, very long time, teaching and transforming sentient beings on behalf of the Buddha. After the Buddha's parinirvāṇa, an old monk taught a young monk, reciting the Dharma of the liberation path as "water crane." Ānanda asked him to correct it, but the old monk refused, and instead said that Ānanda had become senile and could not remember clearly the Dharma the Buddha had taught. Thereupon, Ānanda, heartbroken and sorrowful, left the Sahā world.

Repeatedly and repeatedly it has been emphasized that everyone should cultivate more merit and nurture more good roots and merit, yet few people are willing to cultivate merit and nurture good roots and merit. So it is perfectly normal that they do not understand the Buddhadharma—the Buddhadharma is not something that meritless people unwilling to cultivate merit can easily understand and realize. Realizing the Buddhadharma requires great merit; only with great merit can one have great wisdom. Small faculties and small wisdom are indeed not in accord with the profound Buddhadharma. Even accomplishments in worldly dharmas require merit, let alone the great matter of birth and death that transcends the world, let alone the great matter of liberating oneself from afflictions accumulated over immeasurable kalpas, and even more so the utterly inconceivable, supremely great matter of accomplishing the Buddha Way. For those whose minds hold only themselves, who think only of benefiting themselves, how could they possibly be in accord with the great Dharma of the tathāgatagarbha, which is of the nature of selflessness?