The Importance of Merit

Without merit, it is very difficult to cultivate meditative concentration and advance. As soon as one sits down to meditate, human affairs arise to disturb one, forcing one to deal with them; just as one is about to enter meditative concentration, disturbances appear from the other side, and one still has no choice but to discern and handle them. Reflect on this: in which areas is each of us constantly depleting our merit? Once you can reflect on this, you should take care not to casually waste your own merit, so as to seek rapid progress on the path of practice. Material life in modern society is so highly developed—does this indicate that sentient beings today have great merit, while sentient beings at the time of the Buddha had little merit? Worldly people casually cash in their seeds of merit to use for enjoyment—this is truly lacking in wisdom and lacking in good roots. People with good roots and wisdom keep their merit in reserve for cultivating the Path, rather than cashing it in as worldly phenomena for enjoyment and showing off.

Many people like to take pride in impermanent things of worldly dharma, using them as capital for showing off—such as "I am such-and-such a high official," "I have such-and-such status and authority," or "I am so-and-so, immensely wealthy beyond compare," "I have such-and-such talent," "I have such-and-such exceptional qualities," and so on. All of these are illusory worldly dharmas, unreliable, soon perishing; even if they exist, they are empty. Worldly people find it hard to realize emptiness; they only know existence.

In the past, Chan patriarchs, wishing to find a disciple to carry on their lineage, would interrogate the disciple's views to observe whether he was enlightened and whether he had wisdom. As soon as the disciple opened his mouth to speak, the master would know he was not enlightened, and would say: "Your merit is meager; you cannot sustain my lineage." The patriarch's meaning was that an important reason for insufficient wisdom is insufficient merit. When our thinking is disordered and unclear, we should also frequently look for the reasons within ourselves.