With compassion for others, leading your life for the benefit of others, you collect incredible merit. As the great bodhisattva pandit Shantideva said in the first chapter of his Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Life (Bodhicharyavatara), when describing the benefits of bodhicitta, ‘‘Bodhicitta is the most powerful purifier of defilements, negative karma.’’ There are a few stanzas where Shantideva talks about how powerful bodhicitta is in purifying negative karma.
He continues, ‘‘Like relying on a very powerful person when you want to be saved from danger, relying on bodhicitta, practicing bodhicitta, the good heart, for just a minute, even a second, purifies very powerful, inexhaustible, negative karma. Why, then, would the conscientious not entrust themselves to bodhicitta?’’ [Chapter 1, verse 13.]
If you have compassion in your everyday life, you collect the most extensive merit and purify much negative karma in a very short time. Many lifetimes, many eons, of negative karma get purified. That helps you to realize emptiness. How? To realize emptiness, you need much merit and great purification. For example, to realize a million dollar project, you need a million dollars. Similarly, to realize emptiness, you need a vast accumulation of merit. By practicing compassion, benefiting others, you accumulate great merit, and the realization of emptiness comes by the way.
Longdrol Lama Rinpoche, a great yogi from Sera-je Monastery who often saw Tara, the embodiment of all the buddhas’ holy actions, said that she advised him to practice tong-len. This practice involves your taking other sentient beings’ suffering and its cause onto yourself, destroying your ego, and giving your body, happiness, merit and everything else to other sentient beings, dedicating everything to others, causing them to receive whatever they need, as a result of which they actualize the path of method and wisdom and become enlightened. Tara told Longdrol Lama Rinpoche, ‘‘If you practice tong-len, taking and giving, the realization of emptiness will come by the way.’’
But that’s not all. Through compassion, you not only realize emptiness; you also achieve full enlightenment, the total cessation of all mistakes of mind, all defilements, and the complete achievement of all realizations.