If what you do brings on suffering eventually, though it may appear as happiness at that moment, do not do it. After all, food that is beautifully cooked but mixed with poison is left untouched, is it not?

When faced with making a decision, what do people usually do? We usually do the one which brings happiness now but pain in the future. This is called being stupid. It is what we do because we are so addicted to current happiness. We do not think about the long-term results of our actions.

We may talk a lot about karma but when it comes to deciding whether we want to sacrifice our immediate pleasure to create virtue for something good in the future, or for liberation and awakening, we do not want to give up our temporary pleasure. We make the choice: “Suffering in the future — we will deal with that when it comes because it may not even come.” Inside, although we talk about believing in karma, in our hearts we are not sure if we really believe in karma. Or we kind of believe, but karma is going to be different for us, like all our small things, we will just purify them later.

You can really see how difficult this is. In many areas of health, the doctor will give people instructions on how to care for their bodies, and because they see that following these instructions do not bring them the immediate pleasure they want, they ignore the instructions and then suffer from a lot of diseases and debilitation later.

“365 Gems of Wisdom” e-book is out now!