Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 14.6-minute talk, Lama Ribur Rinpoche introduces verses 252 and 253 from the Dhammapada, addressing a deceptive habit common to all of us: our blindness to our own faults while we readily see and criticize others’ failings. He opens by reflecting on why the Dhammapada is beloved yet often misunderstood—its literary beauty can obscure its meaning, and familiarity breeds a kind of spiritual deafness. He then examines criticism itself: what it is, how we practice it (behind others’ backs, under our breath, or to their face), and the unskillful motives that drive it—grumpiness, jealousy, pride, hatred, and the desire to hide our own shortcomings. The Buddha’s verses reveal the core problem: we winnow others’ faults like chaff while remaining blind to our own, and this habitual fault-finding keeps us far from genuine spiritual progress. Suitable for practitioners of any level seeking self-examination.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01dTrack 1SDhammika.mp3
UUID: 0fd1fbd4-886c-4544-a382-857046c9e3a8
Teacher: Lama Ribur Rinpoche
Collection: Dhammika (Lama Ribur Rinpoche)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 14.6 minutes
Words: ~1,690
To continue our series of talks on the Dhammapada, the Dhammapada being one of the most popular and beloved of the books in the Pali Tipitaka. Today I was reading the Dhammapada and it occurred to me that one of the reasons why it is popular is because it is very beautiful. And there’s a certain danger in being beautiful whether you be a person or an object and that is after a while people tend to focus upon the beauty and forget perhaps more important things. And, in many Buddhist countries, in countries like Sri Lanka, other countries, the Dhammapada is very well known. It is in fact so well known that it’s in danger of becoming people are in danger of sort of becoming deaf to the meaning of what the words are actually saying.
Sometimes in some cases because they’ve heard it or they’ve heard the verses, they’ve read the verses, they’ve seen the verses so frequently. In other cases because they’re concentrating on or they’re attracted to the beauty, the turn of phrase of the verses once again rather than the meaning. When I was, thinking about giving this series of talks I was hesitant to do it because if you read a book on Buddhism and now there are many, inevitably the Dhammapada will be quoted very frequently while many of the other sayings of the Buddha perhaps in some cases far more important, far more meaningful, far more, with the meaning expressed in much more depth are neglected. Remember when I was in Sri Lanka I was there for nearly eleven years and I used to read the local newspaper and like most newspapers they’d always have up in the top left hand corner a thought for the day. Okay.
And you know what the thought for the day every day, day after day, month after month and year after year, it was always a verse from the Dhammapada. However, it can be very good in the case of the Dhammapada and works, literary works like that, to read it and then put it aside for a while, a year or two and then have a look at it again. Suddenly the meaning starts to take precedence over familiarity and beauty. And of course when we’re speaking of beauty we’re talking about the sound or perhaps some of the similes used in the verse but in some cases verses in the Dhammapada can be beautiful because they encapsulate some principles or characteristics of Buddhism so well. Sometimes however the verses don’t attract our attention because they are beautiful.
They attract our attention because they tell us a very important truth that perhaps we may have neglected or never thought about. The verses that I want to have a look at today are verses two hundred and fifty two and two hundred and fifty three from the Dhammapada and these two verses would be to me an example of verses that are important because they you might even say they speak some unpleasant home truth to us. These two verses are all about self examination or if you like a quality which is very characteristic amongst human beings, the quality of criticism. The Pali word for criticism is vivecanā and it’s very significant that in Buddhism the teachings of the Buddha have quite a lot to say about criticism. What what is criticism?
We we know about literary criticism and that sort of thing. This is talking about criticism from the spiritual and moral point of view. Criticism I would define as expressing judgments about people or things, expressing judgments about the bad or unfavorable qualities of a person or a thing. We’ve all been a victim of criticism from time to time. We probably have criticised others from time to time.
Occasionally you meet people who have decided that their purpose in life is to be a critic, to be critical of a particular institution or organisation and they feel that it’s their job to go around criticising everything and everybody. Very unpleasant characters. Now there are different ways that we can criticize. I was thinking about this this afternoon and it occurred to me that there are three main ways and I was basing this on my own experience. I have been told by others that I can be very sharp tongued and critical at times.
Probably the most common way of criticizing others is behind their back. There is something about somebody that we don’t like, that irritates us, that we find to be a fault or a failing and to others outside the company of that person we criticize them. We express judgments about what we believe to be their bad qualities. You can criticize somebody behind their back. You can criticize somebody I would say under your breath.
That is that you don’t actually say anything either to them or to others but in your mind or as we would say, under your breath you grumble about what it is you don’t like about them. You have critical thoughts. And of course probably the least practiced form of criticism is to criticize somebody to their face. This is probably done only rarely because it may result in being criticized back or perhaps even attacked. Sometimes we don’t like to criticize people because to their face because in actual fact we like to gripe and condemn and criticize but we’re not really very concerned about changing them in which case criticizing to their face is no good.
So these are three possible ways that we can criticize people. They are rather negative except the last one criticizing somebody to their face. If you criticize somebody behind their back it’s one of the most fruitless and useless things that you could possibly do. Criticism as we’ll see does have a value but it has no value whatsoever if the person being criticized, if he has a fault or she has a fault, if you don’t tell them about the fault, you only tell others about the fault, then of course there’s no way that they could use that feedback perhaps to change or modify their behavior. So criticism can be positive or negative or as we might say in Buddhism kusala and akusala that is skillful and unskillful according to how we do it and according to our motive.
We’ll concentrate on what you might call negative or unskilful criticism first. Once again I was thinking about this. I was thinking about my own at times, the very rare times when I’ve been critical and it seems that there are quite a lot of motives that propel us to criticize either to people’s face or behind their back or under our breath. In some cases we don’t dislike or disapprove of people but we just happen to be grumpy or in a bad mood and things about others that wouldn’t upset us normally now do upset us and we as it were we vent our spleen as we might say in English. Just the negativities that we have come out in the form of criticisms.
When you’ve had a bad day, when you’re feeling down, when you’ve been frustrated or whatever, you tend to become more critical at those times. Another thing that we may do that may motivate us to criticize is jealousy. If we are very sensitive or touchy about particular qualities that we may have and be proud of and then we come across that most unpleasant type of person, the person who is better than us, that’s the one you really can’t stand. One of the best ways to try to pull them down to make them less of what they are or perhaps less than us is to criticize them. This criticism of course will this type of criticism out of jealousy will always be done behind the person’s back.
Very closely related to that is that we sometimes criticize out of pride. Once again we want to try to make the other person look less when compared to us. And of course very often we criticize out of dislike, ill will or hatred. Now in these cases criticism is being used to make hatred look what you might call a bit more respectable. Hatred is one of those qualities of mind that’s got a really bad reputation.
It doesn’t matter how it’s looked at, it is seen as coming from a bad neighbourhood. People will admit to many bad qualities. Admitting to being a hateful person or a person who has strong and passionate hatreds, that is rare. Despite the fact that we all probably do have some hatreds, we don’t like to think of ourselves as being hating persons. So we may hate somebody and we will attempt to describe to disguise our hatred as something else.
We might disguise it as for example criticism. We might attempt to present ourselves as being objectively critical of those other persons or things or institutions or whatever when in actual fact the motive behind it is just hatred. But as we’ll see from looking at this particular verse, another very negative motive behind criticism is to cover up or to hide or to obscure our own faults, foibles and shortcomings. If we have a look at verse two fifty two and two fifty three from the Dhammapada, this is really what they’re about. Easily seen are the faults of others.
One’s own, however, are difficult to see. Like chaff, one winnows others’ faults while hiding one’s own like the hunter hidden behind the bushes. One who is always looking at others’ faults is always irritable and his defilements forever grow. He is far from their destruction. In the first of these verses, verse two fifty two, the Buddha makes several interesting and important observations.
The first one is a very important one. It’s easy to see the faults of others. It’s difficult to see your own. A truth that we sometimes forget or ignore. And secondly, he says that we may, when we are winnowing others’ faults,