Lama Ole’s answer:
That’s easy: you just remember that everyone is a buddha and at the same time that they don’t know it. That’s why one shouldn’t give a bottle of wine to a drunk or a gun to an angry man. If one didn’t know that all beings are buddhas, it wouldn’t make sense to do anything. The fact that they have buddha nature makes Buddhist practice worth it.
The view is what is crucial. Imagine you are a teacher and you enter the classroom and think, “Who put those thirty angry gorillas here?” Then you might as well turn around and leave, because one cannot teach gorillas anything. What can you do with that attitude? But if you come in and think, “Who brought these thirty Einsteins into my class?” then suddenly everything is possible and you give your best. And maybe they’ll quit poking their pencils around in their ears and mouths and will actually listen and learn.
Everything is a projection of one’s own mind. So the faults we see in others we actually have ourselves. For example, if one gets angry about something, this happens because something within oneself was attacked. If one doesn’t have any anger within oneself and people behave strangely, then one thinks, “Why do they do that? What’s the meaning of this?” You look at it like a strange object in a showcase. But if you get angry, that means something in yourself got pricked. We don’t see the world directly; we see it through our own gray or rosy eyeglasses. The more we see people as pure and beautiful, the closer we come to what they really are.
We don’t have to die to go to a pure land, or go anyplace else to meet buddhas. We just have to thoroughly polish our own glasses. If we do that we are at home; we see that every atom vibrates with joy and is held together by love, that everything has meaning just because it appears or doesn’t appear.
On the highest level, you are like someone sitting on the mountaintop with a 360-degree view—everything is open, vast, and full of possibilities. At the same time, you can look down the side of the mountain and say, “All those people have been my parents or friends at some time. They are all trying to find happiness and avoid suffering, and causing themselves some difficulties in the process.” Then without losing the pure view, you work on the relative level to preserve and pass on the Buddhist methods.