Lesson 15 from A Comprehensive Commentary on the Words of My Perfect Teacher works through all eight states without freedom.
Beginning with the three lower realms, the lesson meditates on the sheer duration of suffering without any window for Dharma: ants on the ground at Jetavana Monastery that have been reborn as ants through seven entire buddhas' appearances; a pigeon Śāriputra examined whose pigeon rebirths stretched eighty thousand great kalpas in each direction without an end in sight. On barbarian lands, the teaching makes the striking point that moral darkness is not a matter of geography — great cities full of killing and hedonism qualify just as much as remote tribes. On the long-lived gods, the story of the physician Jivaka — reborn in the Heaven of the Thirty-three, so busy with pleasure he could barely wave one hand to his former teacher Maudgalyayana — illustrates how divine distraction is as fatal to practice as divine blankness.
The lesson closes urging practitioners to treat every Dharma class as the meeting of a long-awaited doctor, and to overcome slackness above all else.
