Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 50-minute teaching on Śāntideva’s Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra, Khensur Rinpoche explores a counterintuitive Buddhist insight: enemies who harm us are actually our greatest allies. He begins by showing how praise inflates the ego while blame deflates it, leaving the mind unstable and prideful. He then makes a striking logical move: if praise truly benefits us, then enemies who damage our reputation are equally beneficial—making anger at criticism philosophically incoherent. The teaching systematically dismantles our attachments to material gain and reputation, exposing how both bind us to cyclic existence. A closing discussion addresses ethical handling of possessions (necessary for practice, but not at the cost of harm to others) and whether anger is ever justified, even for a just cause like Tibetan freedom. For practitioners with grounding in Buddhist thought.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1989-03-20 – Patience – KR.mp3
UUID: 745ab9cd-de68-4e14-923b-409f731be419
Teacher: Kyabje Rinpoche
Collection: Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra
Date: 1989-03-20
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~2,050
That immediately we we we experience a great liking. We think, wow, this person is a great person, and and our mind becomes unbalanced in this way. And likewise, when but on the other hand, when somebody says bad things about it, we mean something, we don’t like this person. Our mind is completely unbalanced. It’s not stable.
At such times when somebody says good things about us, praises us, our mind starts to become unbalanced then we have to think, well there’s others. There’s many other people who are going to put them down. You could say bad things about you. When someone says bad things about you then rather than becoming depressed, well there are other people who think highly of me, are quite willing to talk about my good qualities. In this way we can develop stability in mind.
We don’t become unbalanced. So oftentimes, for example, at the beginning of the Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, there’s a verse of praise and the words 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 occasional arising, so they’re short lived. The verse says that these short lived words have no intention, have no thought to 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. The pleasure which the praiser experiences, the person who’s doing the praising experiences is in no way your pleasure. You cannot share in the pleasure of the praiser. That pleasure of the praiser is of no benefit to you.
But you said, but you answered, okay, The praiser is made happy through their 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 dependent upon words of praise to become happy, upon words of defamation, what do you say? Words that put you down to become depressed is the mentality of a child. 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? So it’s appropriate to think that in fact praise actually harms the person who’s being praised, the object of our praise. That in the case of ourselves, that upon being praised we develop pride. We think that we’re such a great person.
And dependent upon this, then this begins to undermine our disillusionment with cyclic existence. We no longer are quite disillusioned with our 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. Destroys our own happiness.
So it has this quality of generating pride and jealousy, undermining our disillusionment with cyclic existence. It does have a specially bad quality of our existence. And in this sense, it’s 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 the 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 destroy the good qualities that we do presently have and ultimately destroy the happiness that we have. So if praise and fame actually have all these 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, is in fact assisting us. All the negativity that we create as a response to negative, to praise and fame, serves as a cause to take rebirth in, for example, a bad migration. 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, but preventing us from taking rebirth in a bad migration, they help us to take rebirth in a happy migration. 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 and bad migrations, but is helping us to 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 and love towards such a person.
So for those who are seeking to be free of cyclic existence, who are seeking to 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, 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 because of that attachment, can easily create the causes for being reborn in a bad migration. But on the other hand, those who wish our response to those who seek to cause suffering can serve as a means for attaining freedom. That 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 towards 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. I’m not sure just what praise is. And I think it has to compare with encouragement and is it appropriate to say you’ve done well. So, essentially, praise are words expressing excellent qualities, words of the object, words which express the excellent qualities of the object. As to whether are appropriate or not, whether praise is always appropriate or not, you have to examine that there are two possibilities.
If 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, 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 in this person. On the one hand, if it responds to our praise, it causes afflictive emotions to arise in the person, 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 get more enthusiasm, to strive even more to develop these qualities that you’re praising, then it’s quite useful. So in this text when Śāntideva 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, whatever the praise is. If it increases the afflictive emotions, then 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.
In this society you can’t get on without getting money and houses and all that stuff and paying the membership to put it out? 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 constant world. I mean you can’t do it. You can’t even act charitably. But to get the money together in the first place you have to aim for more than the bare minimum.
So that you by just existing you have to be caught up in cyclic existence. It’s bad karma. That’s my question. You can’t escape from cyclic existence. So what is your question? So There are two types of material gains.
There are those types of material gains which in order to obtain, we create negative actions. There are those types of material gains in order which to obtain, we commit positive actions. 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, we should not attain them in such a way that we’re creating any negativity.
Therefore, such types of things are in no way a hindrance to our being liberated from cyclic existence. On the contrary, they’re actually assisting us to be liberated from cyclic existence. So 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 the manner in which we try to obtain these things should be such that we aren’t creating any negativity in order to obtain it And therefore, becomes, and these material things, these material gains become very positive because they’re assisting us in our practice. So in Tibet they used to have this saying that if you kill a fish to feed to the birds, what benefit is it?
If you were to commit a negativity at killing an animal and bringing harm to the animal and take that flesh in order to practice generosity in helping another animal, then this virtue, this positive action, this negative action just cancel each other out and there’s no benefit. It’s of no use. We have to, Śāntideva says that we should as much as possible separate ourselves from harming others and practice patience. Question? I’m sorry.
There’s 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 we can protest and we can say, but it must be done in such a manner that what Tibetan people want is their freedom, that they want the independence just as the rest of the world has freedom. They too want to be able to, for example, to 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 When responding with anger, we’re going to distort in some way the situation.