Spiritual Cultivation and Attainment of Fruition Is a Priceless Treasure That Cannot Be Measured by Money.

For sentient beings to attain the fourth fruit and become great arhats liberated in both ways is by no means a simple matter. For ordinary people, attaining the first fruit is already a gratifying achievement, for it exempts them from the karma of the three evil destinies, so that they will never again fall into the three evil destinies. For such an accomplishment, even if one paid everything the world has to offer, it would be extremely, extremely worthwhile. If one tried to exchange money for such retribution, not even hundreds of millions of kotis could buy it—this is a priceless treasure.

As for sentient beings in the hell realms and the three evil destinies, even if they possessed all the assets of the entire earth, they still might not be able to exchange them for a human body. A person's attachments accumulated over beginningless kalpas being extinguished within a single lifetime is comparable to traveling by airplane—even riding an airplane is not that fast. Those of the third and fourth fruits who have eradicated worldly greed and attachment, before learning Buddhism, often could not stand anything in the world while living in it, and at times felt great anguish; moreover, their conduct and behavior differed everywhere from ordinary sentient beings, as if they were some kind of oddball, and they often could not understand why this was so. Only after learning Buddhism could they understand that they were, in fact, different from others. If a person's bodily, verbal, and mental actions at all times and places are no different from everyone else's—if sentient beings are greedy, hateful, and deluded, and one is equally greedy, hateful, and deluded; if sentient beings' afflictions are heavy, and one's own afflictions are just as heavy—then for such a person, attaining the first fruit in this life is already difficult, let alone even thinking about the fourth fruit.