The Subduer said that all the unbearable suffering of bad rebirths is the fruit of wrongdoing. Therefore, even at the cost of your life, never do wrong. This is the practice of Bodhisattvas. 

Any suffering we experience, such as bad rebirths or any physical or mental pain we experience in this life, comes about because of the negative actions we have done either earlier in this life or, more likely, in previous lives. When we understand that our suffering is due to our past actions, we stop blaming whoever was involved in our present suffering. To learn from our situation, we decide not to accumulate any more negative karma that could lead to similar suffering in future lives. 

We might think that our life is the most valuable thing we have and worth protecting even at the cost of killing, stealing, or lying. But there is no guarantee our negative actions will successfully preserve this life, which we are going to lose eventually. And at the time of our death, we must take with us to our next life whatever negative karma we had created in order to preserve this life. We may end up trading the short period of happiness left in our current life for a longer period of misery in the lower realms. 

We need to wake up and question the rationalising mind that dismisses the karmic results of small negative actions. We also need to pause and look at what is going on in our minds when we are doing negative actions — are we unaware that it is a negative action, in which case we need to study more about the Dharma so we can tell the difference between positive and negative actions? Are we not being mindful and having no idea of what we are doing? Then, we need to restore our mindfulness and awareness so that we are attentive to our actions. Are we being reckless and just not concerned about the suffering we will receive from a negative action because we are getting some happiness right now? In this case, we need to cultivate some conscientiousness that cherishes virtue and think about the effects of our actions. 

Maybe we know what we are doing and realise it is negative, but our mind is just overwhelmed by the strong force of afflictions. In that case, we need to strengthen our antidotes to the afflictions, so they do not overpower our minds and control our actions. We should use our energy to do the opposite of the ten negative actions in addition to refraining from them. These are practical things like not killing, but protecting life, and not stealing, but being generous. 

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