After Hearing the Dharma, Actual Practice Is the Royal Road

Broad learning and extensive hearing is called "counting another's treasures" — you yourself don't have a single penny of it. After seeing another's treasures, you must find a way to obtain your own treasure. What state of mind should it be to count your own treasures? Rather than standing at the water's edge envying the fish, it is better to go back and weave a net. No matter how many fish you see in the deep pool, none of them are yours; only a wise person should turn back and weave a net, and only by catching them with the net can you enjoy them. Yet in this world, people with wisdom and intelligence seem to be few — they only admire others' treasures without wanting to possess their own, and don't even care about going hungry. Some people relish hearing the Dharma day after day but are never willing to put in the effort to attain the Dharma. After reading what others have, you should turn back and work on your own — how genuine it would be to actually possess it yourself! Only what you yourself have counts as having; how can what others have be counted to your credit?

The ancients said, "Learning without thinking leads to confusion." We should say, "Learning without cultivation leads to confusion." Because many people do think, but their thinking is very shallow; without meditative concentration (samādhi), their contemplation stays only on the surface of the Dharma and cannot penetrate deeply. Knowing only a superficial smattering, they claim they have realized, realized — pitiable in their shallowness and arrogance. That bit of thinking cannot be called cultivation at all. Cultivation means repairing and mending — mending one's own body and mind. Only when the body and mind, after being mended, undergo a corresponding degree of change can it be called cultivation. If the person is still the same person, the mind is still the same mind, and one is troubled by afflictions just as before, it cannot in any way be called cultivation — let alone having the fruit that comes after cultivation. There can be no fruit; a fruit one confers upon oneself easily melts away and rots.