Comment:
Time slips away fast and our energies are limited; therefore, practice in accordance with the Dharma would require renunciation of worldly involvements and concentrated dedication in Dharma activities. Nevertheless, ordinary Buddhists could hardly change the habit of getting involved with whatever comes their ways, and are, in addition, pushed and pulled by karmic forces, and thus consequently would waste their preoccupation on all sorts of inconsequential matters, and could hardly sink their minds into concentrated practices in solitude. Through one's personal considerations, insistences and roaming the straightforward path of practice gets generous discounts, and becomes winding and twisted by entanglements to the extent that liberation from Samsara is merely a distant wish beyond reach that gradually fades away into oblivion. Samsara is difficult to escape from and continues incessantly because it has sufficient causal conditions.
Written in Chinese and translated on January 20, 2005
El Cerrito, California