Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 8.5-minute teaching, Geshe Sonam Rinchen explores how praise and criticism shape our spiritual practice and mental peace. He begins by explaining why praise can foster conceit and stall inner growth, while criticism, though uncomfortable, offers concrete opportunity to identify and remove faults. He then addresses the distinction between genuine love and attachment-driven affection, and moves into a nuanced discussion of when compassionate action may require controlled force—such as imprisoning someone who poses serious danger to many. Throughout, Geshe Sonam emphasizes the need for wisdom and discrimination to discern right action, and returns finally to fear: how fear motivated by concern for all beings differs from self-protective fear, and how recognizing genuine danger differs from merely imagining catastrophe. The teaching balances Buddhist ethics with practical life situations.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 P.mp3
UUID: 03e70cef-dc0f-4dbc-8c7b-bea468c2d453
Teacher: Geshe Sonam Rinchen
Collection: Peace (Geshe Sonam Rinchen)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 8.5 minutes
Words: ~905
Praise means that the qualities that you have stay static. They don’t increase through praise. Because it’s quite likely that when people praise you, you just feel conceited. If you feel conceited, you won’t do anything to improve your good qualities. In fact, it can lead you to all sorts of bad activities.
On the other hand, criticism criticism can be extremely useful. Criticism isn’t pleasant. It’s not pleasant to experience. If somebody criticizes you, they’re pointing out faults. If those faults don’t exist, if you don’t actually have those faults, then the criticism doesn’t harm you.
If you do have the faults that you’re being criticized for, then the criticism can help you to identify them. And if you’re able to identify them, you can do something to get rid of them. So in fact, that criticism can be constructive and helpful. If you can take that attitude of being detached from praise and finding criticism constructive, then it will be really helpful. It’s really important that when people praise you that you remain objective and don’t immediately feel inflated.
If people praise you, often it means that other people are going to feel jealous of you. It’s going to bring all sorts of difficulties with it. So have to be really careful about what’s meant by love and we have to try and distinguish between love and attachment. And the trouble is that at present, the kind of loving we do is very mixed up with attachment and desire. It’s a very important question and a profound one because there can be situations where in order to achieve the benefit, achieve the well-being of a great number of people, one needs to practice a certain amount of aggression towards one section of society or an individual.
So there can be situations like that. One needs to be totally aware, totally objective about the situation. This is the most important thing. One needs to assess the situation coolly and one needs to try to see whether it is necessary to, in order to protect a large number of people, it is necessary to practice a certain degree of aggression towards somebody else or a number of people. If those people are actually going to harm a large section of the community, a large number of people, they are creating so much negative energy and the fruit of which they are going to have experience and therefore one has to be prepared to take on the negative consequences of one’s own somewhat aggressive action which may be necessary to stop them from what they’re going to do in order to protect the interests and welfare of a larger number.
So if somebody who has done a lot of harm, who has created a lot disturbance or harm within a country is put in prison. Even if you have the ability to free that person from prison, even if you can let them out, it’s better to leave them in prison for the time being because of the potential he has for destruction. So, one has to be able to approach the situation rationally, one needs to assess the situation, and one needs wisdom and discrimination in order to be able to choose the right course of action. Whatever we do, whatever activities we undertake, we need a combination of skillful means and wisdom. Skillful means means compassion and love and concern for others.
That’s the Skillful means the skillful techniques that we need to employ. Wisdom means the ability to discriminate, the ability to decide what is going to be constructive, what is going to be destructive. We need to have the ability to discriminate and to see clearly. Where there is fear, is always suffering. There is always suffering involved.
There is always mental suffering involved where there is an attitude of fear. If one is motivated by fear for one’s own personal safety, one does in a way attracts more suffering. But if one is motivated by fear for all living creatures, by fear for their safety, I don’t see how this will attract more. I mean, one part of what you are saying is quite correct because if you fear something you have already imagined it, right? If you fear something you have already created a picture or an image of it and in so far as you’ve created an image of it you are experiencing it in a way.
You are sort of experiencing suffering which is associated with that. So in that way your fear is bringing on suffering where if you were acting without fear you wouldn’t have to endure that suffering. Fear because fear in a way means that you recognize the danger of the situation you find yourself in. If you’re not afraid, it means you haven’t really recognized what a dangerous situation it is. If you don’t recognize what could happen, if you aren’t afraid of what could happen then you’ll be unconscious of the danger and when it actually happens it’ll be too late to do anything.
He says I hope I understood your question right and if I didn’t I’m sorry. If I understood incorrectly, I may give an answer which is inappropriate or which is not relevant. That’s the translator’s fault then. She says, I would like to thank you all for the interest and attention that you’ve shown. Thank you very much.