Lesson 40 from A Comprehensive Commentary on the Words of My Perfect Teacher opens the third chapter of the common preliminary practices: the defects of samsara. After establishing that "the rarity of human life" motivates practice and "the impermanence of life" makes urgency indispensable, the lesson explains what this third chapter adds — the recognition that death is not the end, that we are bound to be reborn, and that samsara in all its forms is without genuine happiness.
The lesson first addresses the intellectual prerequisite: genuine conviction in rebirth. It surveys how multiple traditions — Hinduism's Upanishads, Plato's philosophy, Confucianism, and Taoism — all acknowledge the continuity of consciousness, before illustrating it with the Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming's discovery of his own past-life retreat cabin. The lesson then turns to the vastness of our wandering: the bones accumulated in just one aeon would rival a mountain, and the tears wept from suffering would fill the oceans. It closes by establishing the two foundational convictions the entire chapter depends on — that the six realms truly exist, and that liberation from them must be the practitioner's sole ultimate goal.
