Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 16-minute talk, Lama Ribur Rinpoche unpacks a classical Buddhist verse on criticism, using the vivid example of rice winnowing to explain how we habitually pick out others’ faults while concealing our own. He traces the full agricultural process—drying, threshing with buffalo, separating grain from chaff with a fan—to show how criticism, like winnowing, isolates and magnifies small negatives while we hide behind our own self-deception. He then explores why this happens: our eyes face forward, our attention turns outward, and most crucially, our inflated self-image blocks us from seeing our own shortcomings. The Buddha’s deeper warning follows: constant fault-finding makes us irritable, feeds our defilements, and pushes others away. Rinpoche closes by examining the psychology behind our blind spots—why healthy self-appraisal is rare, and why most people asking for feedback actually want reassurance, not truth. Suitable for any practitioner seeking to work with judgment and self-honesty.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01fTrack 2SDhammika.mp3
UUID: a467e940-b7fa-4acc-ba91-8d75e0d4dbcf
Teacher: Lama Ribur Rinpoche
Collection: Dhammika (Lama Ribur Rinpoche)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 15.8 minutes
Words: ~2,063
Be hiding our own. Now in the verse it doesn’t actually make it clear whether we may be deliberately doing this or whether it may be unconscious. Either way it’s an important observation. Here the Buddha is using two similes. The first one, interestingly enough, occurs exactly the same in English.
We can talk about winnowing the chaff of others’ faults. And that same expression is to be found in ancient India. Many living here in Singapore, where we don’t have any paddy fields or wheat fields or anything like that. The meaning of this verse may be, of this simile may not be known to many people. But if you’ve ever lived in a rural area or an area where people grow paddy rice, The whole process of getting rice ready and prepared for eating is quite a long one.
After you’ve cut the rice you have to dry it. And then in most countries, in Asia at least, they’ll have an area in the paddy field. They’ll dry it out. They’ll make it flat. They might spread cow dung on it so that it’s nice and clean.
And they’ll put the rice on there and then they’ll get the buffalo to walk around and around and around on it. And the buffalo’s hooves will knock the grains of rice out of the stem. So that’s the first process. Then you have to collect the stuff together and you have to separate the rice from the husk, which is quite a long process also. You have to knock the rice out of the husk.
I’m not quite sure how they do that here. Then what you have to do is you have to separate the edible part of the rice from the husk. Now I’m sure they do this by machine in some countries now, but in most countries it is done by a process called winnowing. So one person stands on a chair. He holds the rice up and he pours it down.
And another person will stand on the floor with a large fan. And he’ll wave that fan, and as he does, the heavier rice will fall down, the chaff will blow away. So this is a long process. And you might have to repeat that process many times. So eventually you’ll have a pile of rice and over there some distance you’ll have a very untidy pile of chaff.
This chaff will be made up of dead beetles and husks and little bits of grass and other things like that. Then, of course, there are other processes, but we won’t go into that. One of the processes, of course, is that you then have to separate the stones from the rice because stones are heavy too. I remember the first time I went first few months in Sri Lanka when I first went there was the only time in my life I’ve ever broken a tooth. I still have that tooth there you see broken.
Busily eating away at rice, enjoying it, and then suddenly one of the horrors of eating. And there’s a large stone in your rice. And you can break your teeth. It echoes inside your head. It’s a terrible experience.
And I remember saying to somebody who was a rice merchant, said, couldn’t they sort of invent some machine to separate the rice grains from the stones? In Sri Lanka, if everybody’s sitting around eating rice together and somebody has a stone, you can always hear it. It makes a very loud sound. The comment will always be, Ah, manik manik. That means, Oh, you found a gem, a diamond in your right.
And I said to him, couldn’t they invent some machine to to to separate the stones from the rice? And he said, yes, it’s very easy. I said, then why don’t they do it? And he said, well they do do it. And I said, well they don’t do it very well because every two or three weeks I’m eating rice and I get a gem in my rice.
And he said, no, no, no. They deliberately put it in. And this I was informed was because there are certain types of gravel. It’s white, crystalline. And of course when you’re selling rice, if you’re a rice merchant, you want it to weigh as much as possible, don’t you?
So you get it from the wholesaler. All the stones have been taken out and you very put them all back in again. Anyway, the process of winnowing is a process of separating, of picking out. And this very closely describes what a lot of people’s criticism is. They sit down and go to great lengths to pick out thoughts.
There may be many virtues. They’re intent on picking out what appear to be small things and blowing them out of proportion. We might even say in English a nitpicker, deliberately and consciously looking for something to make a complaint or criticisms about. And in this particular verse the Buddha is suggesting that this may be done in order to detract attention away from our own faults. Like chaff, one winnows others’ faults while hiding one’s own like a hunter hidden behind the bushes.
The actual meaning of the Pali verse here is a hide. A hide is an artificial bush that a hunter makes to hide behind so he can catch the game. And this is one of the most negative aspects of criticism. All too often we may be aware of our own faults and shortcomings. We may be very worried by them because they may cause us some difficulties or problems.
And one of the best ways of further disguising, hiding our faults, is to detract attention away from ourselves onto others by criticizing them. Sadly, history, even recent history, is all too full of people who have spent a great deal of time and effort criticizing another person for a particular fault, and later on it is discovered that they themselves are guilty of this exactly same fault. So we’ve got to be very careful when we criticize. We certainly also have to be very careful of those who criticize. It can be a way of simply diverting attention away from their own shortcomings.
The other very negative thing about criticism is discussed in the next verse. The Buddha says that one who is always looking at the faults of others is always irritable. Ujjhana. They’re always irritable. And you will have noticed this in yourself.
From time to time for various reasons you may become very upset by another person, by their behavior. It may be because their behavior is better than yours. It may be just that it happens to annoy you or you disapprove of it. And you start to become very critical of that person. You may not say anything.
You may just sit there boiling, seething with annoyance as you watch them doing that very thing that annoys you. And then you may not say anything to them but you go to others and you will pour out all your venom. And they’ll listen because we always like hearing nasty stories about others for a while. But if you become so critical and you talk about that person all of the time, you run them down and criticize them all of the time, Firstly, others will start backing away from you. And the second thing you’ll notice is that you’re always irritable.
You’re always feeling negative. You’ve got to the stage where that person’s fault may not be the main cause of your irritation anymore. The main cause of your irritation might be that you’re always talking about, thinking about and complaining about that particular person. The critical attitude is making you feel unpleasant. You are feeling irritable.
And when you’re irritable, as the Buddha says, your defilements grow. All of those qualities that are worst grow. You are far from the destruction of the defilements. You are far from being at peace. All that’s happening is that your own defilements are growing.
Now in the first two lines of this verse, the Buddha says that it is easy to see the faults of others while one’s own are difficult to see. Why would that be so? Certainly there are some people who just tend to have the ability to pick out, to notice and to see what is negative in others more easily than they may see the positive. But either way, most of us have the ability to be able to see other people’s faults and shortcomings more than our own. Why should this be so?
Well, think the first reason is because our eyes are in the front of our head. If we were like ants or butterflies and we had our eyes at the end of stalks, Be quite interesting actually, wouldn’t it, when you think of it? We may be able to sort of turn them around and actually observe ourselves. Or if we lived in a world that was all made out of mirrors so that no matter where we went we were able to actually physically see ourselves, our own expression on our face, our own mannerisms and so on. Perhaps we would start to be more aware of our own fault.
But the fact that our eyes are sort of where they are means that we and the fact that our attention is always turned outward. That alone means that we tend to notice others more. And when we tend to notice others more, we tend to notice also their fault. Another thing is, of course, is that we’re very absorbed in ourselves. But we’re absorbed in ourselves in a particular way.
The majority of people have what you would call a self image. We have an idea about how we are. Now a healthy person, a psychologically very healthy person, their image about how they are and how they are are very close. The difference between what they think about themselves and how they actually are is quite close. They have a very good self understanding.
They have a very good self appraisal, a very realistic self appraisal. But many of us do not. Perhaps most of us do not. Many people think that they are far better, far purer, far more virtuous, far more good looking, far more clever, far more pleasant, far more likeable than we really are. Then you get other people who who they tend to depreciate themselves.
They have a very low opinion of themselves, quite unrealistic also. Now when we have a very good opinion about ourselves, as most of us do, the truth about ourselves would probably not be welcome. You may have been in that position once where a friend or an acquaintance has come to you and said, Look, be honest. Tell me what you really think. Never make that mistake.
If you know that person very well, if that person is what we would call in dharma your kalyana mitra, the type of person that you can be completely open with. Certainly. But many people, when they come up to you and say, tell me, what do you think? That other fellow over there, he just said that I talk too much. I don’t talk too much, do I?
Agree with him. Whatever it is, agree with him. It may very well be that he does talk too much and you may very well think that, but he at present cannot see that. If he is a mature person, giving him that feedback may help him. But many people, when they ask us for an appraisal of themselves, they want their self image reinforced.
They don’t want the truth. So our ego, or if you like, our inflated self image, also prevents us from seeing our own faults. It’s not that they cannot be seen, rather that we don’t want to see them. We would be much happier with our own inflated self image. So these are the things that can make these are the things that mean that we tend to have the ability to see the faults of others much easier than we see our own.
And these are some of the dangers in the criticism of others. One of them