Summary Advice

[icy]

1. Realize the value of the human body with which you have been endowed, for it is the result of many past good causes. Appreciate the fact that teachings are available and ready to be implemented.
2. Since this precious human life can be used in powerfully beneficial or destructive ways, and is itself most fragile, make good use of it now.
3. Physical happiness is just an occasional balance of elements in the body, not a deep harmony. Understand the temporary for what it is.
4. A tamed mind makes you peaceful, relaxed, and happy; whereas, if your mind is not peaceful and tamed, no matter how wonderful your external circumstances, you will be beset by frights and worries. Realize that the root of your own happiness and welfare rests with a peaceful and tamed mind. It is also a great benefit to those around you.

--from Mind of Clear Light: Advice on Living Well and Dying Consciously by His Holiness the Dalai Lama

[Tenzin K]

I often thing of whether  I have waste my precious human life. Will I be happy in my old age because I have lead a full and meaningful or will I be looking back bitter with regret?

The 4 points advices it’s a very good reminder for us to live our life with every day in our spiritual journey. The buddhist masters say it is almost impossible to attain and once you have it you should not waste it because it is unlikely to come around again. Basically, a precious human life is where you attain a human body that is endowed with all the free and favourable conditions.

Simply put, a precious human life is a life where you are interested in changing your mind and your situation. Many people go their whole human life never realizing that happines lies right in their own mind. They persue money and fame and nice cars and when they grow old they realize they still aren’t happy. How sad.

To give an idea of how important this human life is to buddhists they often give this illustration:
A turtle lives in the ocean and every 100 years he comes up for air. If that turtle was to rise for air and by chance put his head through a bucket that was floating on the surface it would be extremely rare. Attaining a precious human rebirth is even rarer than that.

[RedLantern]

It is said in the confessions to Avolokisteshvara,"if the flesh and bone of all of our past bodies were accumulated they would create a mass larger than all the mountains in the world,and if all the blood and lymph in fluids of our past bodies were gathered into a huge basin,it would be larger than all the oceans in the world.
To rejoice the type of life,the type of body that we have is extremely important for our mind to grow and develop.Most people living in this world have no connection with dharma and think that  their lives,human bodies  live as fundamentally devoid of any value and that their deaths are of no more than snuffing out of a candle flame and have no understanding of what is going to happen to them after death and generally consider it unknowable and don't think much about it. This causes of further samsara because they fail to recognize these causes as what they are.By having a simple understanding of dharma ,gives us tremendous resourses.By understanding the human body is rare and precious and the tyre of resourses , freedom are causes by having engaged in good deeds in past lives and to make choices both in mundane and in the spiritual sense about actions to cultivate good deeds and avoid wrong doing.