Don’t be afraid of criticism

Sweetness can cause sickness. Praise is sweet, but too much of it can cause one to be sick. Criticism can be like a bitter pill or a painful injection: it is unpleasant surely, but it can do us good.

Don’t be afraid of honest criticism. Remember that no one can really be free from it, not even great people. Criticism is futile because it puts one on the defensive and usually provokes a defensive attitude. Criticism is dangerous because if wounds precious pride, hurts the sense of importance and arouse resentment. But there is a constructive side to criticism. We should listen to criticism, especially if it is constructive, and welcome the opportunity for self improvement. We should restrain our ego and not have hatred towards the critic. We must not be quick to label as our enemies those who do not share our views. Not all who criticize us are our enemies. Therefore, adopt a positive attitude and listen intently to the message of the criticism. Does it have a basis and is there something we can learn from it? We may discover a weakness in our self that we were not being able to see before.

On the other hand, we may come across some incorrigible people who are not affected by our good-well. We may try using peaceful methods and reason with them, but it will be in vain. In this case it is best to ignore them and let them go their own way. Even then we should not be angry or take revenge against them. Because by doing so, we will fall into the same pool of mud they are wallowing in. Getting involved in mud-slinging will make us no better then our enemy. We defile you in the process. Many people interfere with unnecessary things either to do something malicious or to pass uncalled for remarks. As a result of this negative attitude, they get into trouble.

At the same time, we should not be too critical or inquisitive about other people’s affairs and poke our nose where we are not wanted. There is an Eastern folk tale to illustrate this point.
                                                                                    (from- why worry)

                                                       

The power of Patience

In our daily life, there is much that we have to endure. We have to bear all kinds of pain. Both physically and mentally. We have to face worries, frustrations, depressions, and all types of imaginary fears. It is useful to know how to put up with this pain because many physical disorders are brought about by wrong habits of thought. Unhealthy mental attitudes and unnecessary anxieties. Under such circumstances, it will be useful to practice patience.

Patience is mentioned as one of the exemplary characteristics of a religious person, along with sincerity, swiftness in understanding and tenderness one who has these four qualities is said to be worthy of respect. After gaining spiritual liberation, pindola, a disciple of the Buddha, returned to his native place, kosanbi, to repay the people there for the kindness they had shown him. It had been a hot summer day, and on reaching the outskirts of kosambi, pindola sat in meditation under the cool shade of a tree in a park on the bank of the Yamuna River.

At the time, king Udena came to the park with his consorts for recreation and, after music and pleasure, he took a nap in the shade of another tree. While their king was sleep, his wives and ladies-in-waiting took a walk and suddenly came upon pindola in meditation. They recognized him as a holy man and asked him to teach them.

When the king awoke from his nap, he went in search of his ladies and found them surrounding this holy man ad listening to his teaching. Being of a jealous and lascivious mind, the king become angry and abused pindola, saying: “It is inexcusable that you, a holy man, should be in the midst of woman and enjoy idle talk with them.” Pindola quietly closed his eyes and remained silent.

The angry king drew his sword and threatened paindola, but the holy man remained silent and was firm as a rock. This made the king more anger and he broke open an anthill and threw some of the ant filled dirt upon him. Still pindola remained sitting in meditation and quietly endured the insult and pain. Pindola’s ashamed of his bad conduct and begged pindola’s pardon. As a result of this incident, the Buddha’s teaching found its way into the kind’s castle and from there it spread all over the country.

Be patient. Anger leads on to a pathless jungle. While anger irritates and annoys others, it also hurts oneself, weakens the physical frame and discharged from a mind. A harsh word, like an arrow discharged from a bow, can never be taken back even after a thousand apologies. Never use harsh words in a hearts the trouble.

By cultivating and developing patience, the destructive emotional energy within us will not have the chance to surface to take control and direct us to commit evil. I did not hear what you said. One venerable Sariputta, the chief disciple of the Buddha, was confronted by a Brahmin who abused him. When these words did not affect Venerable Sariputta, the Brahmin became even more furious.

Didn’t you hear what I have just said? Shouted the angry Brahmin. Do you have nothing to say to all my insults? Venerable Sariputta, smiled gently at the Brahmin, and replied, “Well, my friend, I don’t hear you loud and clear. But since I know that you have nothing useful to say. I hear only sound vibrations, and I do not listen to the words, so I am not affected by their meaning”.

Forget every evil or insult; remember every kindness. The world has witnessed enough hatred already. Let the future be based on the broad foundation of loving- kindness, compassion and wisdom. The Buddhist way of dealing with problems is not prescriptive but therapeutic. Hatred or anger, like any other destructive emotion, is be eradicated not by suppression but by gradually removing its roots.

If we return violence for violence, there can be no end to it. Enmity will give rise to more enmity. A desire for revenge will arouse more vengeful thoughts. Resentment can never be conquered by resentment, and hatred only begets hatred. The best approach to these evils is to appease them with the antidotes of sympathy, forgiveness, tolerance and patience. Gandhi says: “Take an eye for an eye, and the whole world will be blind.”

                                                                 From  Mātanga Jātaka (Candāla Champion)

ဘာကို ပိုင္ဆိုင္ထားတာလဲ

ပိုင္ဆိုင္ျခင္းႏွင့္ပတ္သတ္၍ စဥ္းစားၾကည့္မိ၏။ သက္ရွိအခ်င္းခ်င္း တစ္ဖက္ႏွင့္ တစ္ဖက္ အျပန္အလွန္ ပိုင္ဆုိင္မႈ၊ သက္မဲ့၀တၳဳပစၥည္းတို႔အေပၚ သက္ရွိတို႔က ပိုင္ဆိုင္သည္ဟု သတ္မွတ္ထားမႈတို႔သည္ ေလာကအလယ္၌ ျပန္႔က်ယ္လွစြာ၏။

ပိုင္ဆုိင္ျခင္း၊ ပိုင္ဆိုင္မႈ၊ ပိုင္ဆိုင္လိုမႈ၊ ပိုင္ဆိုင္ခြင့္ စသည္တို႔ေၾကာင့္ပင္ အမႈတေပါင္းတို႔ ရႈပ္ေထြး၍ အက်ယ္က်ယ္ မျငိမ္းဖြယ္တို႕သည္ ေလာကသားတို႕အား အုပ္မိုးထားသည္သို႔ ရွိေနေလသည္။ ငါပိုင္ဆိုင္သည့္ကား၊ ငါပိုင္ဆိုင္သည့္ ေငြေၾကး၊ ပိုင္ဆိုင္သည့္ ေရႊေငြရတနာ၊ ငါပိုင္ဆုိင္သည့္ ေက်ာက္သံ ပတၱျမား၊ သူပိုင္ဆိုင္သည့္ လုပ္ငန္း၊ ငါပိုင္ဆိုင္သည့္ေနရာ၊ သူပိုင္ဆိုင္သည့္ လုပ္ပိုင္ခြင့္… စသည္ျဖင့္ သက္မဲ့ပစၥည္းႏွင့္ ပစၥည္းျဒပ္ထု အျဖစ္မျမင္ရေသာ ရာထူး၊ အာဏာ၊ လုပ္ပိုင္ခြင့္စသည္တို႔ အေပၚ၌ပင္ သတ္မွတ္ထားခ်က္တို႕သည္ သက္ဆိုင္ရာ ပုဂၢိဳလ္အသီးသီး၏ စိတ္ႏွလံုးအိမ္၌ အစြဲပညတ္ခ်က္တို႔ကို သံမႈိႏွက္ထားသကဲ့သို႔ ရွိေလ၏။ သက္ရွိျဖစ္သည့္ လူသားအခ်င္းခ်င္းတို႕အေပၚတြင္မူ အစြဲက ထိုထက္ပိုေခ်ေတာ့မည္။ ငါ့သား၊ ငါ့သမီး၊ ငါ့မယား၊ ငါ့ေဆြမ်ဳိး၊ ငါ့တပည့္၊ ငါ့ဆရာ၊ ငါ့အသိုင္းအ၀ိုင္း၊ ငါ့မိသားစု… အယုတ္ဆံုး အိမ္ေမြးတိရစၱာန္ေလးက အစ ငါ့ေခြး၊ ငါ့ေၾကာင္ စသည္ျဖင့္ ေလာက ပညတ္ခ်က္တို႕ေၾကာင့္ စိတ္ႏွလံုးအိမ္အတြင္း စူး၀င္ေနေသာ ‘ အစြဲ ’ ေတြကား ေရတြက္၍မကုန္။

လူ႕ဘ၀ေရာက္လာ၊ ေလာကသတ္မွတ္ခ်က္ေရစီးေၾကာင္းထဲ ေမ်ာပါ၊ ေရးစီးေၾကာင္းသံုး ေ၀ါဟာရေတြႏွင့္ ေပ်ာ္မဆံုး၊ ေမာ္မဆံုး၊ တျပံဳးျပံဳးႏွင့္ ရွိခဲ့ေလသမွ် မိမိေနခြင့္ သတ္တမ္းကုန္ဆံုးေသာအခါ မည္သည့္ပိုင္ဆိုင္မႈကို ယူသြားမည္းလဲဟု မိမိကိုယ္ကို စမ္းေမးၾကည့္ေလလွ်င္…။ ေသလြန္ျပီးသည့္တိုင္ေအာင္ က်န္ရစ္ခဲ့သူတို႕အား အသံတိတ္စကားေျပာသြားခဲ့ေသာ အမတ္ၾကီးဦးေပၚဦး၏ ‘ ေခါင္း ’ အျပင္ဘက္ လက္တစ္ဖက္ထုပ္ျပသြားခဲ့ပံုသည္ မေမ့ႏိုင္စရာ။ လက္ထဲတြင္ ဘာမွ်မရွိ။ ဘာမွ်ယူသြား၍ မရ။ အသက္ရွင္ေနစဥ္ ပိုင္ဆိုင္သည္ဟု ထင္ထားခဲ့ေလသမွ် တစ္ထုပ္တစ္ပိုက္တို႔သည္ အေလာင္းေကာင္ဘ၀ ေရာက္ေသာအခါ လက္ထဲတြင္ ဗလာနတၳိ။ ခ်န္ထားခဲ့ရမွာေတြ အတြက္အခ်ိန္အမ်ားၾကီးေပး၊ အစြဲေတြအမ်ားၾကီး အ၀င္ခံ၊ ပညတ္ဆူးေတြ ႏုတ္မရေအာင္ ပြစာၾကဲခဲေလသမွ်၊ လားရာဂတိ အပါယ္ေလးဘံုကား အသင့္ၾကိဳလင့္ေခ်ျပီ။ ယူသြားရမည့္ ကုသိုလ္ကံအရွိန္အဟုတ္သတၱိ သတိတရားကိုမူ အေလ့အက်င့္ ယူ၍ မထူေထာင္ထားခဲ့ေလသမွ် ေသေပါက္ေသ၀ေရာက္မွ ကပ္၍ထူေထာင္ေလ့က်င့္ခ်ိန္လည္း မရေတာ့ျပီ။ ပိုင္ဆိုင္ျခင္းႏွင့္ ပတ္သတ္၍ ျပင္ပ ဗဟိဒၶ သတ္မွတ္ခ်က္တို႔သည္ပင္ စိတ္ႏွလံုးအိမ္အတြင္း၌ ႏုတ္မရေသာ ဆူးအျဖစ္၊ စူးနစ္၀င္ေစသကဲ့သို႔ သံေ၀ဂ ဥာဏ္ထင္ဟပ္၍ တရားရွာ၊ တရားအားထုတ္၊ တရားအလုပ္လုပ္ေနသူတို႕၌လည္း အတြင္းအဇၨ်တၱ ပညတ္ဆူးတို႔ စူး၀င္ႏိုင္ေသးသည္ကို သတိျပဳမိရန္ လို၏။ ငါတရာရွာေနတယ္၊ ငါတရားရေနျပီ၊ ငါရထားတဲ့တရား၊ ငါပိုင္ဆိုင္ထားတဲ့တရား စသည္ျဖင့္ ဥာဏ္မ်က္စိျဖင့္ ျမင္ႏိုင္ေသာ တရားကိုပင္ မူပိုင္ခြင့္၊ ပိုင္ဆိုင္ခြင့္ေတြ သတ္မွတ္လိုၾကသည့္ ေယာဂီတို႕လည္း ရွိတတ္ၾက၏။ သံသရာမွ လြတ္ေျမာက္ရာ၊ ေအးျငိမ္းရာ၌ ထာ၀ရခိုလံႈခြင့္ရရာ အခြင့္အေရးသည္ အျခားမဟုတ္။ ပိုင္ဆိုင္သည္ ဟူေသာ အစြဲအမွန္သမွ် ျဖဳတ္ခဲ့ျခင္းေပတည္း။ နစ္၀င္ေနေသာ ပညတ္ဆူးမွန္သမွ် ‘ ႏုတ္ ’ ဟုျခင္းေပတည္း။

ဤေနရာတြင္ မူလပဏၰာပါဠိေတာ္လာ အလဂဒၵဴပမသုတ္မွ ဘုရားရွင္၏ အဆံုးအမကို နားႏွင့္ ဆက္ဆက္ၾကားသည္သို႔ ၾကားေယာင္လာမိ၏။

ရဟန္းတို႕-

ဤေဇတ၀န္ေက်ာင္းေတာ္၌ အၾကင္ျမက္၊ သစ္သား၊ သစ္ရြက္၊ သစ္ခက္သည္ ရွိ၏။ ၄င္းတုိ႕ကို လူအေပါင္းသည္ ယူေဆာင္လွ်င္လည္းေကာင္၊ မီးရႈိ႕လွ်င္လည္းေကာင္း အလိုရွိသလို ျပဳမူလွ်င္လည္းေကာင္း ‘ ငါတို႔ကို လူအေပါင္းက ယူေဆာင္ၾကသည္၊ မီးရႈိ႕ၾကသည္၊ အလိုရွိသလို ျပဳၾက၏ ’ ဟူေသာ အၾကံအစည္သည္ ျဖစ္သေလာ ဟု (ေမးေတာ္မူ၏။)

အရွင္ဘုရား- ထုိသို႕မျဖစ္ပါဟု ေလွ်ာက္ၾကကုန္၏။ ထိုသို႔မျဖစ္ျခင္းသည္ အဘယ္ေၾကာင့္ပါနည္း။

အရွင္ဘုရား- ဤျမက္၊ သစ္သား၊ သစ္ခက္၊ သစ္ရြက္သည္ တပည့္ေတာ္တို႔၏ ကိုယ္သည္လည္းေကာင္း၊ ကိုယ္ပိုင္ဥစၥာသည္လည္းေကာင္ မဟုတ္ေသာေၾကာင့္ပါတည္း…။

ရဟန္းတို႔ ဤအတူပင္ သင္တို႔၏ ဥစၥမဟုတ္ေသာ တရားကိုပယ္စြန္႕ၾကကုန္ေလာ့၊ ထိုတရားကိုပယ္စြန္႔ေသာ္ သင္တို႔မွာ ရွည္ၾကာစြာေသာ ကာလပတ္လံုး စီးပြားျခင္း၊ ခ်မ္းသာျခင္းငွာ ျဖစ္လတၱံ႕။

ရဟန္းတို႔-

အဘယ္တရားသည္ သင္တုိ႔၏ ဥစၥာမဟုတ္ေလသနည္း။

“ ရုပ္” သည္ သင္တုိ႔၏ ဥစၥာမဟုတ္။ ထိုရုပ္၌ျဖစ္ေသာ ဆႏၵရာဂကို ပယ္စြန္႔ေသာ္ သင္တို႔မွာ ရွည္ၾကာေသာ ကာလပတ္လံုး စီးပြားျခင္း၊ ခ်မ္းသာျခင္းငွာ ျဖစ္လတၱံ႕။

ခံစားျခင္း “ေ၀ဒနာ” သည္ သင္တို႔၏ ဥစၥာမဟုတ္္၊

မွတ္သားျခင္း “သညာ” သည္ သင္တို႔၏ ဥစၥာမဟုတ္။

 ျပဳျပင္စီရင္မႈ “သခၤါရ” သည္ သင္တို႔၏ ဥစၥာမဟုတ္။

အထူးသိမႈ “၀ိညာဏ” သည္ သင္တို႔၏ ဥစၥာမဟုတ္။ ၄င္းတို႔ကို ပယ္စြန္႔သည္ရွိေသာ္ သင္တို႔မွာ ရွည္ၾကာေသာ ကာလပတ္လံုး စီးပြားျခင္း၊ ခ်မ္းသာျခင္းငွာ ျဖစ္လတၱံ႕။

ဘုရားရွင္ကုိယ္ေတာ္တိုင္ ေဟာၾကားေတာ္မူေသာ ႏူတ္ေတာ္ထြက္ တရားစကားပင္တည္း။

တရားရွာ၊ တရားအားထုတ္၊ တရားအလုပ္လုပ္ေနျခင္းတည္းဟူေသာ တရာလုပ္ငန္းသည္ ပိုင္ဆုိင္မႈ သတ္မွတ္ခ်က္ ေလာကပညတ္ထဲမွ ခြဲထြက္ကာ ပိုင္ဆုိင္လိုစိတ္ ျဖစ္ခဲ့သမွ်ကို ျပန္လည္ေလ့လာ ေနျခင္းလည္း ျဖစ္၏။ သည့္ေနာက္ ပိုင္ဆိုင္တာဟူ၍ မရွိ။ အသိတရားပင့္ျဖစ္ေပၚလာဖို႔ပင္။ ထိုေသာအခါ ပိုင္ဆုိင္ျခင္း၊ ပိုင္ဆိုင္မႈ၊ ပိုင္ဆိုင္ခြင့္ ဆိုသည္ကို စြန္႕လႊတ္ႏိုင္မည့္ ဥာဏ္အဆင့္ေတြရင့္က်က္လာေပမည္။ ကိုယ့္နာမည္ အမည္ေပးထားေသာ ကိုယ့္ခႏၶာ၊ ကိုယ့္ရုပ္၊ ကိုယ္နာမ္တို႔သည္ပင္လွ်င္ ကိုယ္ပိုင္ေသာ အရာမဟုတ္၊ သဘာ၀တရား သက္သက္မွ်သာ ဟူေသာ အသိတည္းဟူေသာ သတိတရားကို တည္ေဆာက္ႏိုင္ျပီဆိုလွ်င္ ဘုရားရွင္မိန္႔ေတာ္မူ သကဲ့သို႕ ရွည္ၾကာေသာ ကာလပတ္လံုး စီပြားျခင္း၊ ခ်မ္းသာျခင္း ျဖစ္ေနေတာ့မည္မွာ မလြဲဧကန္ပါတည္း။ ။

The wheel of wandering -on in birth and death.

avijjā paccaya saṅkhāra

saṅkhāra paccaya viññaṇnaṅ

viññannaṅ paccaya nāma-rūpanṅ

nāma-rūpanṅ paccaya saḷāyatanaṅ

saḷāyatana paccaya phasso

phasso paccaya vedanā

vedanā paccaya taṇnā

taṇaā paccaya upādānaṅ

upādāna paccaya bhavo

bhava paccaya jāti

jāti paccaya jarā- maraṇa soka- parideva- dukkha- domanass'upāyāsā bhavanti.

Evametassa kevalassa dukkhakkhandhassa samudayo hoti.

Unknowing conditioning volition

volition conditioning consciousness

consciousness conditioning mind-body

mind-body conditioning sixfold sense-sphere

sixfold sense -sphere conditioning contact

contact conditioning feeling

feeling conditioning craving

craving conditioning grasping

grasping conditioning becoming

becoming conditioning birth

birth conditioning old-age and death; grief, lamentation,pain, anguish and despair exist.

Thus is the arising of this whole mass of dukkha.

Whatever has nature to arise, all that has the nature to cease.

Avijjātveva asesavirāganirodhā saṅkhāra-nirodho

saṅkhāra-nirodhā vuññāna-nirodho

viññāna-nirodhā nāma-rūpa-nirodho

nāma-rūpa-nirodhā saḷāyatana-nirodho

phassa-nirodhā vedan-nirodho

vedanā-nirodhā taṇnā-nirodho

taṇna-nirodhā upādāna-nirodho

upādāna-nirodhā bhava-nirodho

bhava-nirodhā jāti-nirodho

jāti-nirodhā jarā-maraṇa soka-parideva-dukha-domanass' upāyāsā nirujjhanti.

Evamatassa kevalassa dukkhandhassa nirodho hoti.

This unknowing through its entire ceasing volition ceases

volition ceasing consciousness ceases

consciousness ceasing mind-body ceases

mind-body ceasing sixfold sense-sphere ceases

sixfold sense-sphere ceasing contact ceases

contact ceasing feeling ceases

feeling ceasing grasping ceases

craving ceasing grasping ceases

grasping ceasing becoming ceases

becoming ceasing birth ceases

birth ceasing old-age and death;grief,lamentation,pain,anguish and despair cease.

Thus is the ceasing of this whole mass of dukkha.