Spiritual cultivation and the attainment of fruition are priceless treasures that cannot be measured by money

For sentient beings to attain the fourth fruit and become a great arhat accomplished in both liberation (ubhayabhāga-vimutta) is by no means a simple matter. For an ordinary person, attaining the first fruit is already a gratifying achievement, for it exempts one from the karma leading to the three evil destinies, so that one will never again fall into the three evil destinies. For such an accomplishment, even if one paid everything the world possesses, it would still be extremely, extremely worthwhile. If one tried to exchange money for such a fruit of retribution, not even hundreds of millions of immeasurable sums could buy it—it is a priceless treasure.

As for the sentient beings in the hell realms and the three evil destinies, even if they possessed all the assets on Earth, they still might not be able to exchange them for a human body. The attachments a person has accumulated since beginningless kalpas—extinguishing them within a single lifetime is like traveling by airplane; even an airplane is not that fast. Those of the third and fourth fruits who have severed worldly greed and attachment, before they studied Buddhism, often could not tolerate anything in the world while living in it, sometimes feeling very distressed; moreover, their own 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 studying Buddhism could they understand that they were, in fact, different from the crowd. 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 thinking of the fourth fruit.