Bodhisattvacaryavatara, 20 March 1989

It’s okay. Not going. It stopped. It wasn’t on? It’s on.

Is it on now? Okay. Is it a quality of a childish mentality? It lacks the stability. It has an inability to have perspective. It becomes completely wrapped up in the moment.

In this analogy, when somebody praises us, immediately we experience a great liking. We think, wow, this person is a great person. And our mind becomes unbalanced in this way. And likewise, on the other hand, when somebody says bad things about us, we immediately experience suffering and we don’t like this person. This person becomes our enemy.

So our mind is completely unbalanced. It’s not stable. So at such times when somebody says good things about us, praises us, and our mind starts to become unbalanced, we have to think, well, there are many other people who are quite willing to put me down, who could say bad things about me. And when someone says bad things about you, then rather than becoming depressed, think, well, there are other people who think highly of me, who are quite willing to talk about my good qualities.

And so in this way we can develop a stability of mind. We don’t become unbalanced. So as, you know, oftentimes, for example, at the beginning of the Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, there’s a verse of praise. It’s the verse setting out praise. But actually words are inanimate. They don’t have any intention.

They don’t have a mind. And they’re short-lived. They’re only occasionally arising. They’re short-lived. So the verse says that these short-lived words have no intention, have no thought of praising me.

These short-lived words have no intention of praising me because they’re inanimate. So as the words themselves have no intention of praising you, rather than liking the words, we should rejoice in the mind which is intending that praise—that is, the person who’s praising us—and like that person. The words have no intention of praising. It is the praiser, the person who’s doing the praising, who has the intention. And the pleasure which the praiser experiences is in no way your pleasure.

You know, you cannot share in the pleasure of the praiser. That pleasure of the praiser is of no benefit to you. But you say, but the praiser is made happy through their praising. The praiser is made happy through praising me, and therefore this makes me happy.

The praiser is made happy through praising me, therefore this makes me happy. Well, if that is the case, and therefore I like it—if that is the case, well then the enemy who puts you down is made happy by putting you down. Why aren’t you happy at their happiness and like them? So simply dependence upon words of praise to become happy and upon words of insult to become depressed is the mentality of a child.

Insult and praise. So actually, praise and fame hurt oneself. They don’t benefit oneself. What do you think? You don’t think they hurt you?

Think they benefit you? Yeah. It’s fine. When he started talking, his first words were that the person who offers you praise is actually doing a lot of damage because you might believe it. So it’s appropriate to think that in fact praise actually harms the person who’s being praised, the object of our praise. In the case of ourselves, upon being praised, you know, we develop pride.

We think that we’re such a great person and dependence upon this begins to undermine our disillusionment with cyclic existence. We’re no longer quite so disillusioned with this dissatisfactory quality of our present life. In developing pride, it also causes us to develop envy and jealousy of those who have some excellent qualities. It ends up, through the force of causing us to generate pride and jealousy and envy, to destroy what happiness we do have. It destroys our own happiness.

So it has this quality of generating pride and jealousy, undermining our disillusionment with cyclic existence, that unsatisfactory state, the quality of our existence. And in this sense, it’s an extremely great fault. It increases our negative aspects of ourselves and in no way helps us to increase our positive qualities. If we look at the qualities, what ensues from praise and fame—due to, in response to praise and fame, we generally generate pride and jealousy. And therefore, we create a great deal of negative karma and it acts as a means to disturb all the good qualities, to disturb and destroy the good qualities that we do presently have and ultimately destroy the happiness that we have.

So, you know, if praise and fame actually have negative qualities about them, all these negative characteristics, then anyone who prevents, who eliminates this result, anyone who rids us of the causes which bring us such difficulty is actually our friend, is actually helping us, aren’t they? Therefore, the person who seeks to destroy our fame, who seeks to eliminate whatever praise that might be directed at us is in fact helping us. It is in fact assisting us. You know, all the negativity that we create as a response to praise and fame serves as a cause to take rebirth, for example, in a bad migration. So, if someone were to protect us from taking rebirth in a bad migration, we would think this person is very helpful to us.

They’re really our friend. They not only help us in this way, preventing us from taking rebirth in a bad migration, they help us to take rebirth in a happy migration. And the person who does this is our enemy? The person who prevents us from receiving praise and fame is actually helping us not to take rebirth in bad migrations, but is helping us take rebirth in happy migrations. Therefore, our response of anger is extremely inappropriate.

We should, in fact, respond with a great deal of sense of rejoicing and caring for and love towards such a person. So, you know, for those who are seeking to be free of cyclic existence, who are seeking and see that material gain and honor are actually what is binding us within cyclic existence, then anyone who frees us from our bondage of material gains and honor is actually helping us toward our ultimate goal of what we’re striving for, of liberation. And therefore, should be seen as a friend, as a helper, an assistant in our journey toward that end. Those who we become attached to, those are our loved ones, our friends—such a type of response can easily be transformed into attachment. Because of that attachment, we can easily create the causes for being reborn in a bad migration. But on the other hand, our response to those who wish to cause us suffering can serve as a means for attaining freedom.

In fact, those who seek to cause us suffering are actually bestowing the great waves of the blessings of the Buddhas upon us. Because it is in response to them and not to our friends and our loved ones that we will eventually achieve Buddhahood. And therefore, toward such a type of person who is opening the door away from taking rebirth into bad migrations, but is in fact opening up our ultimate happiness to us, anger is a completely inappropriate response. Do you have any questions?

I’m not sure just what praise is. And, like, how does it compare with encouragement? And is it appropriate to say you’ve done well?

So, you know, essentially, praise are words expressing excellent qualities of the object. Words which express the excellent qualities of the object. As to whether they are appropriate or not, whether praise is always appropriate or not, you have to examine. There are two possibilities. If your praise causes the object, the person, to develop pride, then it’s inappropriate. But on the other hand, if it helps them to increase their enthusiasm, to encourage as a means of encouraging, it causes them to make even more effort and increase their good qualities, then of course, it’s quite beneficial. But it’s not if it simply causes them to create pride.

So on the one hand, if in response to our praise there’s any—it causes afflictive emotions to arise in the person, you know, whether it’s attachment or hatred or pride or any type of afflictive emotion—then the words are not beneficial. Such type of praises are in no way beneficial. On the other hand, if it simply encourages the person toward a positive direction, to more enthusiasm, to strive even more to develop these qualities that you’re praising, then it’s quite useful. So when, in this text when he talks about the negative qualities of praise, he’s only talking about it in the context where it increases the afflictive emotions of the person that we’re praising. If it increases afflictive emotions, it’s inappropriate.

You know, if you make a great deal of effort to receive praise and fame, you won’t get it. But if you don’t make any effort to receive praise and fame, then you’ll get lots of it.

Well, if we’re enslaved in the cycle of existence because of our need to have property and money and material possessions, I mean, how can we live in this society without getting money and houses and all that stuff and paying the membership to Buddha House? It becomes a very difficult, a big question because if you let go, then there’s nothing to support you in your old age and the whole Western world. I mean, you can’t do it. You can’t even act. But to get the money together in the first place, you have to aim for more than the bare minimum. So that by just existing, you have to be caught up inside the—it’s bad karma. That’s my question. You can’t escape from cyclic existence in Western society because you have to, like, buy houses or inherit houses or, you know, even if you give part of it away, the fact is that to be able to survive and to take responsibility for yourself as an old person, you have to have money.

So what is your question? That’s it.

So there are two types of material gains. There are those types of material gains which in order to obtain we create negative actions. And there are those types of material gains in order to obtain which we commit positive actions.

So in this context Śāntideva is talking about those material gains which in order to obtain we engage in various negative activities which serve as causes for suffering in the future, taking rebirth in the bad migrations, for example. But we have to have material gains, such as in order to have the necessary conducive conditions, the environment, in order to practice Dharma. For example, we have to have material things. But in obtaining those material things, it should not be—we should not obtain them in such a way that we’re creating any negativity. And therefore, such types of things are in no way a hindrance to our being liberated from cyclic existence.

On the contrary, they’re assisting us to be liberated from cyclic existence. So, you know, we need material possessions. We need material gains, for example, in seeking to create the conditions to carry on a spiritual practice. We have to have a house, we have to have food, we have to have clothes, we need all these things.

But it’s the manner in which we try to obtain these things. It should be that we aren’t creating any negativity in order to obtain it and therefore it becomes—and these material things, these material gains become very positive because they are assisting us in our practice. So in Tibet they used to have this saying that, you know, if you kill a fish to feed to the birds, you know, what benefit is it? You know, if you were to commit a negativity, like killing an animal and taking that, or bringing harm to the animal and take that flesh in order to practice generosity in helping another animal, then this virtue, this positive action, and this negative action just cancel each other out and there’s no benefit. That’s of no use.

So we have to—Śāntideva says that we should as much as possible separate ourselves from harming others and practice patience. Question?

I’m sorry. So is there never an occasion where anger is appropriate, even in the case of when we’re protesting a just cause? For example, in the case of Tibet.

That is quite—you know, that we can protest and we can say, but it must be done in such a manner that, you know, what Tibetan people want is their freedom, that they want the independence to, you know, just as the rest of the world has freedom, they too want to be able to, for example, pursue their spiritual practices.

But the way in which we protest shouldn’t be motivated by anger, but should be non-violent. So our response must be in a very honest, open manner. If we respond with anger then what we say will not be in accordance with the actual situation. It will be somehow distorted. So it’s only—you know, when in responding with anger, we’re going to distort in some way the situation.