Seeing the buddha in your chance encounters

Today my retreat finished and I am easing back into daily life. I already had my first interaction with a friend I randomly ran into in the marketplace. But in the end, the whole purpose of retreat is not to run from life, but rather to prepare to engage in life in a more productive way. This is why I felt it was quite a good idea to write these blogs while I was on retreat so I could think about how to interact with the world once I got back into it.

The 31st slogan of Lojong is "don't malign others." This is quite an obvious slogan: don't speak ill of people. As I mentioned quite a few times before on this blog, sometimes it feels good to take others down, so we can feel better about ourselves. But apart from the fact that this feeling good is only short-lived, in the end, it also does your relationship with the person you are talking with no good. After all, who likes to talk to someone who only complains about others?

Khandro Rinpoche also says that it's very easy to judge--it doesn't give the other space to make mistakes, to work with themselves. it may sound naive, but giving others the benefit of the doubt usually improves the quality of your interactions. If you assume others have good intentions then I find that often people feel that and proceed to interact with you in a more positive way than when you assume others' bad intentions. I find this relatively easy now but when I was bullied as a little kid, I always had the feeling that other kids were speaking bad about me, and this made me very anxious. So this habit is definitely shaped a lot by your experiences with other people. Now most people approach me positively I find it quite easy to do.

Saying hello to the door. Picture by Anna van der Meijden https://www.instagram.com/annamaypine/?hl=en

Yet, I don't think this means you can never criticize people. I actually sometimes have that tendency because I don't want to make other people angry. But that in itself doesn't help either because tensions are built and never spoken off. Or even worse, people who behave poorly and harm others get never any headwind and therefore step by step make their behaviour even worse because they think they can get away with it. So, just like all these slogans, I think they should be applied with care. Nevertheless, seeing things from the perspective that all people are inherently buddhas-to-be, and therefore inherently good, definitely makes the world a better place.