How to Practice to Benefit

Cultivating practice is like going into a cornfield to pick corn. Your purpose is to pick the corn, bring it back, cook it, and fill your belly—not to sightsee and browse around the cornfield. Therefore, picking the corn is the primary task. Of course, before starting to pick, you can take a rough look at the situation in the cornfield—which ones are ripe and should be picked, which ones are not yet ripe and should not be picked—and then choose where to begin. But some people are not like this: they wander back and forth in the cornfield all day long, hungry, touching here and looking there, yet never getting down to picking. Such a person is a fool.

Buddhist practitioners are the same. After roughly browsing, reading, and being steeped in some Buddhist teachings, you must set about genuine cultivation and real practice, choosing the nearest and easiest point of entry, and applying yourself solidly and earnestly to the practice of the Path—gaining whatever you can gain, realizing whatever you can realize. You cannot spend years upon years, a whole lifetime, always remaining at the stage of extensive listening and immersion in the teachings, tirelessly studying the teachings of others and counting money for others. Having your own wealth and treasures is the true way; otherwise you will starve to death and become a hungry ghost.

If you wish to have your own attainments on the Path and not become a starving ghost, you must begin from the foundations and apply yourself solidly. Cultivate a bit of the thirty-seven aids to enlightenment wherever you can; abandon evil and cultivate goodness, subduing afflictions bit by bit; purify the mind, bit by bit. Even if you have not yet seen the Path, what you have cultivated in this way can be carried into future lives for your benefit. Cultivating is far more useful than not cultivating, and far better than counting others' treasures. Happily counting other people's money and immersing yourself in it, only when the time comes to use it do you discover that not a single cent belongs to you—and by then it is too late for regret. For those who are intelligent and wise, how to study the Dharma and cultivate practice should now be very clear in their minds.