To conclude: you are born alone and die alone, friends and relations are therefore unreliable, Dharma alone is the supreme reliance.

What more can I add to that? It is said so succinctly, and it is so true, isn’t it? We are born alone. Even if you were part of a set of twins or triplets, or even if you live your whole life surrounded by other living beings who promise never to abandon you, can they fulfil that promise? We are born alone, and we die alone. Even if everybody dies together at the same time, each of us has our own experience. Nobody else really shares our experience with us in the same way.

Others can be lovely people who promise all sorts of things, but how can they fulfil those promises when they themselves are impermanent and under the influence of afflictions and karma?

Others may mean well but what can they really do in the long-term or even in the short-term, when they have no control over their minds, their afflictions come and go, and their karma is ripening here, there, and everywhere? Can they really protect us from suffering?

We might have a big dog or even a bodyguard who says, “I’m going to protect you from anybody who tries to hurt you,” but even then, that living being too can easily be injured and die. So, how can he protect us from suffering when he cannot even prevent his own body from injury and death?

People promise to protect us from mental pain: “I’m going to love you forever. I’m going to support you forever.” But do they? They are under the influence of afflictions. Their minds bobble up and down. One moment, they like us and want to be with us always, the next moment they get mad at us and never want to be with us. All these things are controlled by other conditions, they are not self-generated things that we have control over. The mind changes. Karma changes. The only real protection is our Dharma practice, because who knows what we will wind up experiencing in this life?

It is very interesting when you read people’s biographies. Some people start with horrible circumstances when they are young, and by the time they are old, they have a very nice life. Others start with a wonderful life when young, and then as they age, negative karma ripens, and they experience a lot of pain and suffering. For instance, the aristocrats in China wound up being imprisoned, beaten, and tortured simply because they were from the upper classes during the communist and cultural revolutions. Nobody saw this coming. When somebody is born, nobody could have said, “You know, you are going to be imprisoned and tortured by the time you are 40 years old.”

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