If right at that moment, instead of telling yourself how harmful it is, you practice patience by thinking how useful it is, if instead of thinking how useless it is, you think how necessary it is, you will immediately experience peace and tranquillity in your mind. Instead of being troubled, you’ll be happy, then and there. Moreover, you won’t be impelled to retaliate and will therefore refrain from harming others. In this way you will avoid creating the negative karma of injuring others with body, speech and mind.

If out of anger you give harm to others, you leave negative imprints on your own mental continuum. These then manifest as problems in this life, future lives or both—problems such as sickness, ill-treatment at the hands of others, premature death and so forth. These are called "karmic results similar to the cause in experience," and we create them ourselves by responding negatively to those who are angry at us.

Therefore, by practicing patience, you don’t harm others and thus don’t harm yourself. If you don’t practice patience, you harm others and therefore yourself. Furthermore, when you practice patience and refrain from harming others, you protect them from retaliating in response to your harm, thereby saving them from creating extra negative karma, the cause of suffering—you protect others from having to experience the karmic results of giving you harm. Thus, by practicing patience, besides creating the cause of happiness for yourself in this and future lives, you help others to experience happiness in this and future lives.

As a result of your practicing patience and not harming the person who’s angry at you, that other person doesn’t give you further harm. Not only is there peace and happiness for yourself and the other person in this and future lives, but you are also training your mind to be patient with others. This person is helping you do that. You are learning to be patient with the rest of your family, the rest of your colleagues, all other human beings and all sentient beings in general. The person who is angry with you is helping you train your mind to be patient and positive instead of angry and negative.

As you eradicate anger from your mental continuum and replace it with patience, the rest of the sentient beings receive no harm from you, the individual whose mind has been transformed into patience. The absence of harm, their not receiving harm from you, is peace. What they receive from you is happiness.

The benefits of patience

Historically, you can see how, at different times and in different places in the world, one influential person who did not practice patience caused millions of people to die. As a result, many millions of people underwent extraordinary suffering by being imprisoned, tortured and killed—during the Hitler era, in China, in Tibet, in Cambodia, in the West and in many other countries as well. Even now, because they do not practice patience, certain individuals are killing many people. They lack the qualities that make a person good.

Now, consider yourself in light of the above. As an individual practicing patience, learning to be patient, by freeing your mind of anger, you can offer great peace and happiness to numberless other sentient beings, not only in this life, but in many future lives to come. Since there’s no anger, you don’t harm others. Therefore, many people, animals, fish and insects, for example, receive much peace and happiness from you. Thus, life-to life, with patience towards all sentient beings, you bring significant peace and happiness to the world. By practicing patience you give peace to the world—to your parents, the rest of your family, your friends, the people you work with and, on the grand scale, all sentient beings.

Leaving aside other realizations of the path, if those powerful people had only been educated in, possessed and practiced the good human quality of patience, the good heart, each could have given so much happiness to the world. Many millions of people would have had happiness, enjoyment and long lives instead of just the opposite. One person could have made so much difference had he only been patient instead of angry. Put yourself into this situation. This could happen to you. If you don’t practice patience in this or future lives, you, too, could be reborn as someone who harms millions of people. Therefore, you definitely need to practice patience. You should consider it a responsibility. It is extremely important that you educate yourself in patience and practice it. It is perhaps the most important meditation you can do.

When you practice patience, you eliminate anger. That means there’s no enemy to bodhicitta in your mind. In other words, it makes it much easier to achieve bodhicitta, the ultimate good heart, the altruistic mind set on attaining enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. Bodhicitta is the gateway to the Mahayana path, the root of the path to enlightenment and the source of all happiness for both yourself and others.

By actualizing the perfection of patience, you can attain full enlightenment, the great liberation, the cessation of all mental errors and the completion of all realizations. Once you have attained enlightenment, you are free to work perfectly for the welfare of all sentient beings in order to liberate them from all suffering and its cause and bring them to buddhahood as well. This is the long term benefit of practicing patience in your daily life right now, a benefit as measureless as space itself.

Practicing patience today will allow you to become the perfect guide and bring all happiness to numberless sentient beings. Therefore, when somebody treats you badly or when someone gets angry at you, these are the benefits of not getting upset. You can look at it differently. You can see how responding with patience is the source of all happiness—not only your own immediate happiness but also that of your future lives; not only your own happiness, but that of numberless others. You can make it all happen. It comes from your patience.