Living with Compassion 
by Lama Zopa Rinpoche

What is it that makes your life easy and free of confusion and problems?
What is the source of all happiness and peace?  What brings happiness and peace into your daily life and every happiness up to enlightenment, allowing you to bring happiness and peace to numberless sentient beings?

It's your attitude - the unmistaken attitude with which you life your life, the attitude by which you live your life according to its meaning, fulfilling your purpose of having been born human. 

What is that best attitude that gives the most meaning to your life? It is living with compassion, for the benefit of others. 

When your attitude is that of simply seeking your own happiness, the attitude itself attracts many difficulties and creates obstacles to your own success. Even if you are trying to serve others, when your basic motivation is that of seeking your own happiness, you experience many ego clashes and personality problems in trying to work with other people. Whether you are working in a meditation centre or an office, if you are self-centred, you will bring all kinds of useless garbage into your life, especially when associating or dealing with others. All kinds of emotional problems will arise. 

So even though the work you are doing - working for the welfare of others - is good, your self-centred mind generates all sorts of harmful, unnecessary emotional thoughts - thoughts that are totally useless as far as your job is concerned; thoughts that make others unhappy and angry and disturb their minds. Thoughts such as anger and jealously create much disharmony between yourself and others. 

These harmful emotions impede the success of your work, bring no peace, happiness or harmony, interfere with your work and your health, and can even create obstacles to your life, to your very survival. By leading you to suicide, such thoughts can even cause your death - you're not killed by someone else, you're killed by your own emotional mind. 

The moment you begin to cherish yourself is the moment you have created an obstacle to success in working for others. Self-cherishing brings constant problems. Broadly speaking, if you have self-cherishing you cannot develop bodhicitta. As long as you do not renounce self-cherishing, you cannot develop the holy mind of cherishing others. That means you cannot attain enlightenment, cannot work perfectly for the sake of all the numberless sentient beings. 

Thus you can see how the self-centred mind is the main obstacle that prevents you from benefiting others. It is from the self-centred mind that desire, anger and all other negative, emotional thoughts arise, obscuring you mind, blocking your wisdom. Even though there may exist many methods for solving a particular problem, and you have the potential to apply them, your self-cherishing attitude totally obstructs your wisdom and prevents you from either seeing or applying them. 

These emotional thoughts obscure your mind and cause it to hallucinate. Therefore, you cannot perceive the methods that would bring happiness, peace and harmony. Even though, simply by changing your attitude - something that your mind is quite capable of doing - you could apply those methods and solve your problems very easily, somehow you never see it or are unable to do it. 

Also, when you are not clear about the purpose of life, you are never clear when it comes to making decisions that affect your life. You always hesitate and are always in danger of making the wrong decision. When your single purpose for living is nothing other than the benefit of others, it is very easy to make the right decision. It is easy because you are very clear about why you are alive. 

If there is compassion in your heart, you do not harm others. All other sentient beings receive no harm from you, the one, individual person. Instead of receiving harm from you, they receive peace and happiness. Not only do you not harm them, but out of compassion and according to your ability, you benefit them as much as you can. On the basis of not harming, you benefit. Therefore, numberless sentient being receive so much peace and happiness from your compassion. 

So whether or not numberless sentient beings receive that great peace and happiness from you is entirely up to you. Giving great peace and happiness to others is completely up to you, because it depends upon what you do with your mind, whether or not you practise compassion towards others. You own mind makes the decision - either you keep going from life to life harming sentient beings directly or indirectly, or you change your attitude from ego to compassion and offer sentient beings all peace and happiness up to enlightenment. All this depends completely on what you do with your own mind. 

Therefore, each of us here is responsible for the peace and happiness of all sentient beings, of each sentient being - all happiness up to that of enlightenment. The purpose of our lives is, on the basis of abstaining from harm, to bring happiness to others, to be useful for others, to free them from all suffering and bring them all happiness. 
One kind of happiness is that of this life, but long term happiness - happiness in all coming future lives - is much more important than that. And while causing others to experience happiness in all future lives is highly meaningful, it is even more important to lead them to the everlasting happiness of total liberation - cessation of the entire round of suffering and its causes, delusion and karma. 

This is more important that simply the long term happiness of future lives, because the happiness of future lives is still contaminated happiness while the happiness of liberation never diminishes or degenerates. It is the complete cessation of suffering and its causes. Once the seed, or imprint, of delusion has been eradicated, there is no cause for delusion, and therefore suffering, to ever arise again.