Like dew on the tip of a blade of grass, pleasures of the three worlds last only a while and then vanish. Aspire to the never-changing supreme state of liberation. This is the practice of Bodhisattvas. 

The three worlds are the desire realm, the form realm, and the formless realm. The desire realm pleasures are sense pleasures, and form and formless realm pleasures come from concentration, but all of them last for only a short while. If we think back, even in this life, we have had a lot of pleasure and happiness, but where is it today? We have all worked very hard to accomplish certain things in the past, but what happened to the happiness and pleasure we experienced afterwards? At the end of our life, we can end up with a lot of photo albums, scrapbooks and journals, but where is the actual life that we lived? It will be gone, gone, gone. We may have some stories to tell, but is the purpose of our life to accumulate good stories? 

Think about the image of a drop of dew on a blade of grass. It is there in the morning but disappears when the sun comes out and never returns. It is the same with the transient happiness we experience in cyclic existence, which is grade “F” happiness because it does not last very long. It is here and then it is gone, and in the meantime, we experience much unhappiness trying to get it. We also create a ton of negative karma, which follows us to our future lives. We are so locked into the vision of just this life that we think everything that exists is only what we are experiencing now, and all that can ever be labelled “I” is who we are right now, in this body. That is such a narrow vision of what is happening on the conventional level, let alone the fact that there is no inherently existent person there to experience it. 

The Buddhas are trying hard to get us to open our minds so we can attain a kind of happiness and bliss that does not let us down, leave us, and is not just a slideshow at the end of a lifetime, but a state of bliss that comes from freeing our mind from afflictions and karma. A state of bliss that comes from generating January | 43 bodhicitta and knowing that we are making our lives meaningful for all sentient beings in the long term. We just need to broaden the spectrum and see that the supreme state of liberation is completely within our reach. We can create the causes for this kind of result with the proper motivation and joyous effort. 

“365 Gems of Wisdom” First Volume (January — March) e-book is out now!