Previously, Emperor Wu of Liang State built many temples, and then went to ask Bodhidharma how much merit he had earned. Bodhidharma said: "None!" The Emperor was a stupid person, and even got mad at him. Bodhidharma was telling the truth but truthful words offended the emperor's ears. Being an unenlightened Emperor, he sent him away.

Later, the Emperor heard from someone who had more wisdom that Bodhidharma was great, was a real enlightened master. Then he regretted what he had done and invited Bodhidharma to come back, but he refused!

Most masters can ignore us. If you want, you follow him; if not, he is not bothered either. He won't lose anything. He knows that sentient beings are difficult to teach. Why should he trouble himself?

He will not chase after us, we should chase after him! Sometimes we can't catch up with him. He just lets it be, he doesn't care. He leaves the opportunity for the later people, or lets us get fed up ourselves -- life after life, after one thousand, two thousand or twenty thousand years, then we ourselves begin to seek, to climb up.

So he does not worry, does not care. Neither will he bother to interfere with us, as we won't gain merit doing this, because we are in the maze. What does it have to do with him whether we have merit or not in a maze?

It is not that the masters are arrogant, but simply that their thinking is different from ours. He is a very free person. He is at ease. How can we bind him? How can we make him beg us all the time. We are the prisoners ourselves! We should beg the person outside to save us. How can he beg us to ask him to save us? Life and death are our business, he is liberated already!

That's why I tell you not to learn magical power. It can change our life, but just changing our own life, the plan for the whole world will not change.

Like when we get tired, get sick, we take some drugs, and lay down and become anesthetized, so we won't feel the pain. Then we imagine our bodies become very beautiful! We become queens, Miss Universe or whatever. It turns out that by the time we wake up, everything has remained the same.

The whole world will not change because of our imagination, it is only that our illusions cheat us. How much can we cheat ourselves? This depends on how much imagination we have, how great our magical power is. In fact nothing has changed. You imagine that for five years you are a king and do many successful things. Five years later, you wake up and find yourself still a beggar sitting there.

Everything remains the same when your illusions break. The whole world doesn't change, we just entered a world of imagination, which we have created for ourselves, just like having a dream. Practicing magical power is self deceiving, it is totally useless.

When the time is up, after the illusions break, it is worse than before; because we have lost our valuable time in pursuing that illusion, instead of using that period of valuable time to seek the Truth. We lose several days, weeks, months or years, just living in the world of imagination, and did not use that time to meditate on the Truth, to know our real nature; so we lose even more. What if we die in that period of time? We have nothing left! Magical power cannot change heaven and hell, that is the trouble.

Magical power cannot change our karma. It can only cheat us and let us live in the world of illusion for a while, so it is useless. In a world created by magical power, you seem to have become a very wealthy person who owns everything. Your neighbors also seem to change with you! They respect you, have dealings with you, do business with you, and so on; but those are also part of the illusion. The neighbors did not change in reality.

We ourselves build a theater, then we play inside. The real people are not there. Those who play are not real people either, they are illusionary. It's like when we have a dream, we can do everything, but when waking up we have nothing. Magical power is like having dreams, its time is longer perhaps.

Magical power cannot change any of our karma, merit or life; so learning magical power is useless. The more you cheat yourself the more trouble you have. Then we lose even more -- we go astray and have wrong concepts. It takes a very long time before we can go back to our starting point, let alone to the place of Truth.

For instance, originally we are at position zero here. If we move to the right, we can find Truth. Now we not only don't go to the right, but instead go to the left, for the sake of illusion. So we go further and further. When later we want to look for the Truth, we still need to go back to point zero in order to start from there to go right; not sure even if we can find the path to the right. We waste a lot of time. If we die in the middle, we will have nothing. We are further away from that point zero, from Truth.