Respect for Criticism

We live in a world where there’s a lot of criticism. The trick to living in this world lies in knowing how to take the criticism. As the Buddha said, if someone points out something that genuinely is a fault in you, you should regard that person as someone who’s pointing out treasure, a place where you can make improvements. Because if you don’t see your faults, how are you going to improve? How are you going to overcome them? So if something is a genuine fault, then whoever points it out to you is helping you. As for things that are not genuine faults, basically they’re showing their opinions. They’re showing their perspective, which may be friendly toward you, may not be friendly toward you. But that’s part of the world.

As the Buddha said, human speech has many types. There’s kind and there’s unkind. Useful, useless. True, false. All of these are normal in the world. When someone says something to you with bad intentions—or something totally useless, or something false—just take that as a lesson about them. But always be willing to be open to criticism.

This is one of the reasons why the monks are told not to show any disrespect to people who criticize them—even so much as making a face—because when you’re open to criticism, then there’s the opportunity to learn. If you’re not open to criticism, you’re not going to learn anything. We’re not here to be good already. The reason we’re here is we’re not good enough. If we were already good, we wouldn’t have come back to be reborn. But here we are. Here’s our opportunity to learn.

There’s that theory that you go through lifetimes and you learn lessons, and you go higher and higher as you learn your lessons. But the Buddha saw it’s not inevitable that you’re going to learn. Sometimes you learn a lesson, you forget, and you fall back down. This is what mindfulness is for: to help you recognize good lessons and remember them. Take them to heart: That’s the ardency part, when you realize you really want to do this well this time around. And then you’re alert to watch where you might be making mistakes that no one else is around to notice—so that you can become your own best critic.

People say so much about getting rid of your critical voice inside. Well, you need a well-trained critic. It’s through well-trained critics that artists learn. And it’s through your internal, well-trained critic that you’re going to learn. So train your critic to be wise, to keep in mind that the big issue is what will be for your long-term welfare and happiness rather than for the short-term pleasures, short-term gratification.

So you’re going to have outer critics and inner critics. And if you train your inner critic, then you have to rely less and less on outer critics. And you’ll be able to recognize good outer criticism. But still, always be open because you never know what you might learn.

There are cases in the forest tradition of monks who are reputed to be arahants, and they still learn. They don’t have any lessons to learn about their greed, aversion, and delusion anymore, but there still are things to learn in life. So take them as an example. Even people who have completed the Buddha’s training have still things that they can learn about how to be helpful to other people, how to teach other people—practical things on a day-to-day basis. It’s all part of the training, especially if you’re not at that level yet. Everything you do—from sweeping up, cleaning around, looking after the place—counts as part of the training. So always be open to learn from yourself, from other people, from your actions. Because there is a lot to learn, and we don’t have much time.