Lama Zopa Rinpoche

We have that responsibility. The world’s peace and happiness is on our shoulders. Practicing
patience and compassion, refraining from harming others, we bring great happiness to
numberless living beings: to the numberless hell beings, hungry ghosts, animals, human
beings, gods, demigods and intermediate state beings. In that way, we are responsible for the
peace and happiness of all beings of the six realms.
Then, with the compassion we have developed toward all living beings, we develop wisdom.
In that way, we are able to bring them not only the temporary happiness of this life but also
that of future lives. Then, by understanding the mind they understand karma, cause and
effect, what specific results come from the actions of body, speech and mind—what brings
suffering and what brings happiness. By having the wisdom understanding karma, they are
able to gain ultimate happiness, liberation from the oceans of samsaric suffering. In that way,
we are able to bring them to the blissful state of peace, individual liberation from the oceans
of samsaric suffering forever. They no longer have to experience any suffering: the suffering
of pain, the suffering of change and the cause of those two sufferings, pervasive
compounding suffering.
Not only that, by developing compassion and wisdom, we are able to bring all the
numberless living beings to peerless happiness, sang-gyä, the state of the total cessation of all
obscurations and the complete development of all realizations.
There can be no happiness following the self-cherishing thought
Developing compassion and wisdom is amazing. What our mind can do, what our heart can
do, is just amazing. However, if you are like me, your heart at the moment is full of selfcherishing.
We think, “My happiness is more important than anybody else’s. My happiness is
more important than that of the numberless buddhas, the numberless bodhisattvas, the
numberless sentient beings. It is the most important thing of all, more important than the
happiness of the numberless hell beings, the numberless hungry ghosts, the numberless
animals, the numberless human beings, the numberless gods and demigods and the
numberless intermediate state beings. I’m the most important one! My happiness is more
important than anybody else’s!”
At the moment our mind is in that condition, but the mind itself is not oneness with the selfcherishing
thought. Not at all. It is just temporarily obscured by delusions. Holding the selfcherishing
thought has no logical reason. Cherishing the I is just an ego trip!
The self-cherishing thought is nothing but a dictatorship and there is no logical reason for
that dictatorship. It cannot posit one valid reason why this I is more important than anybody
else, whereas there are infinite valid reasons to cherish the numberless others who only want
happiness and who do not want suffering. There are numberless buddhas and bodhisattvas
and there are numberless sentient beings who do not have bodhicitta, so there are
numberless beings to cherish. Using valid reasoning we can transform our mind.
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