The Cultivation and Realization of the Buddha-Dharma Requires Immense Wholesome Roots and Merit

The Buddhadharma is hard to realize and hard to cultivate, requiring sentient beings to practice for three great immeasurable kalpas. If the Buddhadharma were easy to understand, easy to realize, and easy to cultivate, sentient beings would not need to cultivate for three great asaṃkhyeya kalpas in order to perfectly accomplish the Buddha Way; if the Buddhadharma were easy to understand, the Buddha would not have emphasized that sentient beings need a considerable degree of good roots, merit, and precepts, meditative concentration (samādhi), and wisdom. As for the Tripitaka and the twelve divisions of the scriptures, some people have read them five times through, yet without touching even the edge of the Buddhadharma, and the shadow of awakening to the Way remains far beyond their sight. Sentient beings have been deluded and inverted for immeasurable kalpas, immersed in the worldly dharmas of illusion, and it is truly not easy for them to comprehend the profound Buddhadharma.

The Buddha taught the Dharma for forty-nine years, and yet at the time of His parinirvāṇa, there were still countless sentient beings who had only a half-baked understanding of the Buddhadharma, and some did not even have that. It was precisely because Ānanda saw how foolish and hard to teach sentient beings were, and how they misinterpreted the Buddhadharma, that he had no choice but to leave the Sahā world himself one hundred years after the Buddha's parinirvāṇa; originally, relying on his power of meditative concentration and his merit, he could have remained in the world for a very, very long time, teaching and transforming sentient beings on behalf of the Buddha. After the Buddha's parinirvāṇa, an old monk taught a young monk, reciting the Dharma of the liberation path as "water crane." Ānanda asked him to correct it, but the old monk refused, and instead said that Ānanda had become senile and could no longer remember clearly the Dharma the Buddha had taught. Thereupon, Ānanda, heartbroken and grieved, left the Sahā world.

Repeatedly and repeatedly it has been emphasized that everyone should cultivate more merit and nurture more good roots and merit, yet few people are willing to cultivate merit and nurture good roots and merit, so it is perfectly normal that they do not understand the Buddhadharma—the Buddhadharma is not something that meritless people unwilling to cultivate merit can easily understand and realize. Realizing the Buddhadharma requires great merit; only with great merit can one have great wisdom. Small faculties and small wisdom are indeed not in accord with the profound Buddhadharma. Even accomplishments in worldly dharmas require merit, let alone the great matter of birth and death that transcends the world, let alone the great matter of liberating oneself from immeasurable kalpas of afflictions, and even more so the inconceivably great matter of accomplishing the Buddha Way. For those whose minds hold only themselves and who think only of benefiting themselves, how could they possibly be in accord with the great Dharma of the tathāgatagarbha, which is of the nature of no-self?