SNAKES AND DOVES
PHAP QUANG CULTURE COMPANY
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In the Bible wrote a story: “Once, Jesus sent his disciple down to earth to teach human beings. He said: “I command you to live a life like sheep living among wolves, be wise as snakes and be kind as doves.” We completely agree with this statement, so we like to discuss this statement in depth with you all today.
In our life, we are usually prone to fall into two extremes. The first extreme is to use our wisdom to deal with events in our lives and then lose our morals gradually i.e. human being is naturally selfish so sometimes we use our wisdom to harm or take advantage of others for our own benefits. The second extreme is to live submissively and stupidly without being knowledgeable and always have to obey others’ orders. This weakness often causes more harm to our own lives.
These are the two extreme cases that we all need to avoid. However though, most of us fall into one of these two extremes. Those who are smart and strong are easy to fall into the first extreme. Those who are not smart enough and are weak would usually fall into the second extreme. They are easy to be taken advantage of or affected by others.
For those newly graduates, they finished university, and were being exposed to the new world in which they met many different kinds of people. In this society, people must be wise to compete with each other because of the conception “Compassion means Stupidity”. It is perceived that compassionate people are unwise and dull, as well as they are not brave enough to live on their own and achieve any success. They worship wise and tough people and struggle for their rights in life. So these young people ’s conception of life change accordingly and this is really sad.
We live together in this world but we always fight and compete with each other over own benefits, so life becomes worse and worse. Kindness or compassion is one of the important elements of ethics, but in reality it is perceived as cowardice and weakness. Clearly, this perception is completely wrong. If we only consider one in many meanings of kindness and compassion and are being narrow-minded, we will be led to having inaccurate judgment. To avoid falling into the two extremes, we should be wise as snakes and kind as doves.
So what does “be wise as snakes and kind as doves” mean? And what is the difference between being wise and being kind?
To understand “wisdom“, we need to analyse three basic points.
First, we must analyse the past event, what has happened, and learn from those experiences. For instance, since we made errors on the last exam, we scored low points. So we worked harder for the next exam in order to achieve higher score. Recognising and learning from our failure to live better is a mandatory element of wisdom, too.
In addition to this, acknowledging others’ good points is also important to help us develop and enhance our knowledge. Why are there so many people that can be very persuasive? What they say could influence others. So if we recognise their strengths, respect and learn from these influential people, we will gradually improve ourselves. Now, that is wise.
The second point of wisdom is the ability to predict what will happen in the future based on the present. This factor is extremely essential for everyone. We would do everything for a better future. However, what did we learn from school? We have learned many things that happened in the past e.g. known events and old scientific inventions…
The subject of “Futurism” started to gain interest in this current society. Although it hasn’t been applied to school curriculum yet but some education experts have researched and wrote books about it. These experts are called “Futurist”. In our opinion, “Futurism” topics must be brought into schools from primary level. This basically means we would practise predicting future events i.e. what will happen, when and how. Why is that necessary? Upon graduation, we face the future not the past. But we were only taught about the past, so it is difficult to expect us to think forward about our future. For example, we graduated from University of Economics, so when you had a job, the boss would always require us to use our skill and knowledge to predict the future of the economy, organise tasks and planning to deal with future events or possibilities. If you were capable of doing those things, you were then suitable for the job.
Again, the ability to predict the future needs to be practised from an early age. If we waited until we graduate from University to think about the future, it would be too late and we could be caught off-guard. It can be from very simple events. For example, when our brother was sick, then we guessed we would have guests tomorrow. When the teacher assigned us too much homework, then we would guess about the incoming test. We should try to guess what would happen and how.
Initially, we would predict what could happen in a short time, later on, we could predict what could happen in a long time. We could think about our personal life, our family or further to social issues, security, national politics and the world. We could try to predict about how the world would turn out to be in ten years times; or in twenty years, how human beings would progress in technology and what inventions would be available. Those who could predict those important and big events would be very talented. They could base on the current findings to predict the breakthrough and achievements in the future.
Have you ever heard about an invention against noise? It consisted of two parts. The first part was to analyse the noises coming from the outside. The analysis result will then be passed on to the second part, the processor. The processor then created the outgoing noise by reversing the incoming one. Because the two sound waves were opposite of each other, they destroyed each other, hence the noise disappear. Thus, knowing the nature of sound, we knew then how to eliminate noise.
At present, the world is worried about bush fires because bush/forest resource is an invaluable asset of mankind. Maybe in ten or twenty years later, when scientists discover about the nature of fire, they may be able to find an effective and easy way to extinguish it. Have you ever thought about this?
The third element of wisdom is the ability to assess other people to cooperate with at work. If you could make accurate assessment, you would reduce the risk of failure and improve the success rate, and product good result. This ability plays a very influential role in communication or selection of friends or business partners. The difficulty is the ability to assess someone to decide if we can trust them or not. Finding the right people for the jobs is a great challenge to all leaders. We should not believe in those who never keep their words. For those types of people, we should always be armed with strategy to deal with any challenges.
Or for people who are malicious and selfish, then we should find a way to leverage from their strengths but always be on alert with their potential malicious acts. Assessing someone accurately is even really critical and beneficial in marriage.
So from the above discussion, we can see that these three elements of wisdom include learning from past experiences, the ability to predict the future, and the ability to assess people accurately. These are three important factors that you need to practise before entering into the real world full of challenges.
Now, we will talk about the three elements of kindness, or sometimes throughout this discussion, I would refer to as leniency.
The first element is the calm reaction against unexpected things. Those who can react like that could be patient and calm in any harsh conditions. If we could be lenient in the situations where we were cheated or treated badly by someone, it did not mean that we were a loser or we were stupid or coward. In fact, it showed that we were strong enough to control ourselves.
If we are easy to lose temper and easily getting hatred of unsatisfying things, we could not do great things. Once getting hatred, our mind and judgement will be clouded, we would become more obscured hence it would lead to the situation where we could make more errors.
The second element of leniency is about not attempting to harm others. Sometimes it could be within our reach, but we would not do that.
The third element is about love. Our love for others shows our leniency or simply humanity.
Amongst many other elements of leniency, these are three key elements.
So, these are the three elements of wisdom and the three elements of leniency integrating in life as Jesus stated: “Be wise as snakes and be kind and gentle as doves.” We must live wisely but with compassion and we also must live compassionately but being wise. Those two statements above are completely different and do not contradict each other.
So what does it really mean when saying “We must live wisely but with compassion”?
It basically means we would understand about others i.e. whether they are bad, or good, however we still love and would be calm to deal with any situations arisen. We could assess properly others and understand the situations, but we would be calm and considerate and would not take advantage of other people. We treat everyone equally and with compassion.
For example, we have two friends, one is better at things than others, we would love them both equally, no distinction at all. As being Buddhists, we should not discriminate between good and bad people or between smart and unintelligent people. Why is that? Because our discrimination would make vulnerable people sad and that discrimination would mean we committed a sin and we are at fault.
Non-discrimination is easy for us when we were still at school, but when we grew up and entered into the real world, this became more challenging. Nothing to discuss when meeting good people, but it is challenging when encountering bad ones. They could harm or abuse us so treating them fairly and equally is a hard thing to do. However, if you encounter those ones, please remember our discussion today. This would help us to convert evil people to good ones in the future. As Buddha once said: no flame can destroy flame, no hatred can destroy hatred, only compassion can destroy hatred. It’s the absolute truth. Compassion does function in that way. Whoever does wrong or evil things, we should still be generous and tolerant towards them.
Let’s analyse the two situation: one is being that we resented and abandoned those who treated us badly; and another one is being that we forgave those who treated us badly. So which one would help these bad people return to being good? The later it is. Because while we do not othem to change overnight, over time, they would understand and realise what is right and wrong because of our tolerance, consideration and love for them. By forgiving them and treating them with love, we did not push them further into doing bad things.
So, what does it mean when saying “we must live compassionately, but being wise”?
It basically means even though we knew about others taking advantage of us, or doing bad things to us, we would not revenge at all. This showed our compassion and wisdom. In this life, there are people who come to us only for taking advantage of us. We can feel and recognise those situations because we can rely on our wisdom. However, the most difficult part is knowing about the situation very well but we do not feel resentment towards them. Sometimes we also pretended to be taken advantage of but we could control the situation. We could because we understood their thoughts and intention and used our wisdom to control the situations. More importantly, it is a sign of wisdom, morality.
In “The Misery” novel, Victor Hugo told us the story of a man who was suspected of stealing the offerings of a church. When the police asked the Father if the man was stealing the offerings, the Father said “No, he was not” then the Father asked the man why he did not take the silver spoon as it was a valuable item. The story showed that the Father knew everything but still opened a way to save the thief. Because of his kind action, the Father helped made the thief become a different and better person.
The above approach reminded us about our ancestors. In the past, when our troops defeated the Northern invaders, we were not proud of the victory at all, so we proposed a ceasefire to the Chinese court in order to maintain a peaceful relationship with China. Under the Ly Dynasty, our troops were so strong that we won so many battles; we then occupied two provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi in China. China was so angry that they challenged us to a battle on the bank of Nhu Nguyet river. However, at that time China was still defeated. In spite of victory, our ancestors still actively proposed to a ceasefire to China because of our peace-loving spirit, wisdom and sophistication. With our compassion, we were ready to negotiate when the problems were resolvable without putting up a fight.
Another aspect is that we know how to gain other people’s compassion but we do not take advantage of them. Even though we were capable of performing and communicating with others, we would not take advantage of the situation, so as the result, others will be very kind and loving us. That showed attitude of a person who is compassionate and wise.
It is very common that when we gain someone’s trust and consideration, we would take advantage of the situation for our own benefit. However, for someone who is ethical, they will love and be kind to everyone and would not take advantage of others. That is why they gain other people’s love and respect.
Because with them, they would use their wisdom to help others and bring more benefits to others.
Why is that? Because according to the Cause and Effect rule, if we owed others favour we would need to pay it back in some ways in other lives. This was preached in “The concept of karma law.” The reason for a person that could be the leader of a country is that they did many and many good deeds in many lives. Obviously, while they were doing good deeds, they would only think of benefits for others and would love all people. If they did the good deeds but because of fulfilling other purpose i.e. gaining other benefits, then these good deeds would be still meaningless. Those two motives are completely different. We must do good deeds without any conditions. Being ethical and doing good deeds would help us gaining blessing.
For those who received favours from others will inevitably need to pay others back in other lives. So there is only a profession can affect many lives. Have you ever heard of “professional beggars”? Those beggars usually started a day with a big breakfast then deformed feet with red drugs and bandages. Afterwards, they dragged themselves into the crowd to beg for money and food. They went back home in the afternoon, removed the bandages then took a bath and went to the movies. They even could loan money for interest, or gambling, or drinking. They do not understand karma law that receiving favour from others would require some paybacks. In their later lives, they would be in a position that everyone can order them to do things. They are called slaves. And for those who always save every penny to help and save others only because of their compassion will become leaders, or commanders in future lives. This is a very objective and fair rule of karma law.
We love people but we should not indulge people’s bad habits. We love our younger brother but if he did something wrong, we should teach or even can use punishment where required until our brother could understand and change his behaviour and become better person. It is love, but love with determination, wisdom and compassion. Like so, in life, we must love everyone but it doesn’t mean we compromise and agree with bad and evil things. We could not change everything but we should try our best to minimise bad things for this world.
Recently the American Reader magazine had an article titled “Prisons or Resorts?”. The reporter went to the prisons in the United States and found prison life here is better than outside and much better standards than students’ life. The prisoners here can play sports such as golf, tennis, baseball, basketball, softball. Also they can go to the libraries and even the concert halls. They can communicate with people outside quite comfortably. For those who were sentenced to life imprisonment, each year they could have a party. They could invite their guests from the outside if they wanted to. There are many things that could happen within this prison that we would rather not tell you. Seeing this, the reporter wrote: people outside work hard to pay tax but this tax is for the state to pamper those who murder, rape, child abuse, every sin… We now could see that the Americans made serious mistake in treating prisoners. By creating a comfortable environment in prison, they did not help criminals correct and learn from their mistakes. That is the weakness of a big and complicated society. Now, let’s talk about people around us. We love them but we should determine not to pamper or compromise their mistakes or sins. In fact, we must determine to address their mistakes and sins by all means.
Another aspect of living compassionately and wisely is knowing the way to use money and power to help and educate people. Having money and power does not inherently mean you are guilty. The way to use money and powers is being questioned here. If we use money and powers for good things then money and power are put in good use; otherwise, they are bad things. If you are always thinking for other people, then money, power in your hands will bring others lots of benefits. In contrast, if the power and money held by an evil man, evil things will spread and dominate this society.
Thus, basically an ethical man should not have personal ambitions. We strongly recommend that all personal ambitions are sins. Only when we really purify our mind, money and power in our hands will create good things for society.
Once upon a time, King Ly Thai To – Ly Cong Uan was predicted to become the king by his teacher – Zen Master Van Hanh. When he grew up, some other Zen Masters also had the same prediction. He lived in a temple since he was a child. Because of this prediction, his teacher prevented him to be a monk but forced him to compete for a government official position. He became a commander, supervising the guards of the capital. When King Le Long Dinh died, the country didn’t have a leader, so the court elected King Ly Cong Uan, founder of the Ly dynasty, took the title of Ly Thai To King.
King Ly was very reserved about his power. He always fulfilled his duties even when only a few people predicted that he would be the king. However, when the king died, the court elected him king, he accepted and this was entirely satisfied everyone. The Ly dynasty led the Vietnamese civilization to glory. This example shows us that when power and money come into the hands of a good and ethical person, good things will inevitably happen.
A compassionate man will always have an attitude of meekness, harmony and always living for others without any prejudice. We should always be willing to fight for the rights and benefits of vulnerable people. We are very lenient but not weak, our compassion will be the motivation to master our inner feelings.
However, compassion sometimes will lead to extreme. We are not sure how it happened and to whom, but sometimes the xtreme did happen. In those cases, they do not care what others say and do, they just consitnue pampering and spoiling others. True and genuine morality is not really those sort of actions. A truly moral person must be very clear about their thinking and actions, when needing to fight, they will fight, when needing peace they will cooperate to achieve peace. We will compromise our own benefits if peace is beneficial for everyone. We will say tough words if that is what it takes. We will co-operate and fight for the sake of everyone not for ourselves. That is the critial element of compassion and wisdom.
Today, I also would like to talk about success and failure in life. Everyone in this world wants to succeed. We learn, practise many things in order to be successful and contribute towards the society. This is most people’s dream.
However, not everyone can achieve their dreams, and in fact, there are very few people that do have their dream come true. Life is ups and downs. Some people claim that their success is due to their talent, wisdom and sometimes a little ruthlessness is needed. The poor always fail because they are weak and not capable. Sometimes life has a look and think like that. In the Buddhism philosophers’ eyes, these things appear in a completely different way. We try to understand everything on the basis the law of cause and effect or karma law. Success or failure is due to the cause of many things that happen across many generations. Maybe you will disagree with this thinking. You may be thinking without talent you would not succeed in life, especially in the competitive market economy, fierce, only those who are very good, very skillful and talented can be successful.
Let talk about a simple thing, wire. There are so many types of wire produced and sole in the the market. Whoever has the knowledge about the product and the ability to produce the wire with many superior features with cheap costs and sell it with cheap price will take a lead in the market. But to do so, these people must be talented and also sensitive about the market movements. Therefore, the key factor for success is talent, but it also critically depends on the law of cause and effect. A person, who in a previous life had earned many blessings because of his/her many good deeds, would be more talented that the person who did not have much of blessings because he/she did not do many good deeds in their past lives. However, talent is a complicated thing. We will talk about this in another occasion. We know that success or failure in our current live depend on what we did in our previous lives so we should be calm in any event, either a success or a failure. We should not be too proud when we are successful and not depressed when we fail but we should firmly learn from our mistakes and move on. Those, who are too proud about their current success, may not be achievemnt more success greater in life.
As we strive to do something, let ensure that we put all of our effort to do well, but do not put all our hope to it. If we did, we would be depressed if it failed. So when trying to accomplish a goal, we should only expect about 70 percent for the success and 30 percent for the failure. If it did not work as we expected, the 30-percent component will help us keep us calm, balanced. We should look into those failed scenarios and learn from these mistakes. Only calmness and concentration will help us move on and have another goal to reach. That is the attitude of a very wise and virtuous man.
There have been many questions about big dream, success and failure:
“Do we need to have a big dream or have a great idea of bringing the benefits for mankind?
Why does the person with a big dream become upset, depressed, and suffering or even lose their mind when failed?
And would we rather not have big dreams and not be ambitious so we would not be suffering when failed?”
Based on the above, does it mean that it is not wise to advise people to be ambitious and have dream and working hard towards their goals? We would suffer when we did not achieve our goals but only when these dreams were for our own benefits. For example, when a person walked across the street, he saw many poor and homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk then he dreams of becoming the Prime Minister to provide houses and food for those needy people. Is it a good dream? It is very good, in deed. But will he be able to become the Prime Minister? We cannot be sure about that. Then he comlained that God did not help his dream come true, about not letting him become the Prime Mister so that he could provide houses and food for the homeless. Well, he would suffer from this disappointment because his primary motivation is about having power and fame, his personal ambition, not because of others’ needs.
Buddhism philosophy has stated very clearly that selfishness causes suffering. Suffering only happens to selfish people, happiness would happen to selfless ones. If we dreamt of being the Prime Minister to progress further in our career and if there are only personal goals in this dream, we will suffer when we could not achieve it. Those who wish to benefit everyone’s lives without any selfishness will not suffer even when they fail. This is what I really meant.
One of the story in the “Collecting sand and stones” series advised us about Zen Master Thich Nhat Sam, a monk and also a painter. Probably because of his meditation strengh, it helped him paint very beautifully, but he would sell these paintings with a very high price. Therefore, many people did not like him because he was a monk but very greedy for money. One day, there was a girl asking him to paint her portrait. When he told her about the price, the girl angrily shouted him at him and told him that he was mean. Then she turned her back, took off her coat and asked him to draw her skirt, because she wanted to humiliate him. However, the Zen Master still stayed calm and drew a beautiful dress on her back.
After a while, he stopped drawing, then people realised the true three purposes of his behaviour (i.e. selling his drawings with high price):
The first purpose was to build a tower for his teacher since he died long time ago but there was not a tower for him. That was due to his devoted love to his teacher;
The second purspose was to fix the damanged road near his temple; and
The last purpose was to build a warehouse to store food for the villagers after floods.
When he accomplished those three goals, he gave up paintings to live in seclusion. Until then, people could understand his behaviour and understand that he was so tolerant and generous. So, the key thing is that we need to purify our souls. Sometimes, people assessed us based on the outside i.e. our behaviour, our work and judged that we are selfish. However, that is only the interim assessment and we should not have to be concerned. The important point is that we live for others, and thinking about others from the bottom of our hearts.
Buddhas has always praised meditation as a harmonious synthesis of wisdom and morality. When our mind is calm and peaceful, we think clearly about everything. When our mind is clear, we are able to assess the others’ behaviours, and their nature hoslisticly. And also thank to meditation we also can practise to predict our future in more details than those whose minds are not pure. Before practising meditation, we could only see what the others did to usl, however with the aid of meditation, we cleared our minds and could see things more clearly and in a different way. Or, for some particular issues, we could not analyse or understand why it was the way it was, now with meditation, it helped us understand the issue and helped analysed it better. Therefore, for those who practise meditation and are good at it, they could be better at seeing and predicting future events than others.
Besides, for those whose minds are pure and calm, they are also very kind and compassionate. Because of this quality, their selfishness is less and they are sensitive and patient. So, meditation itself is a great combination of wisdom and morality. We always wish you to practise mediation throughout your lives. This era is the Information era so it easily makes us stressed. When our minds are weak, it is difficult to understand and assess all information properly. To strengthen our mind we must meditate.
The last thing we want to discuss today is that wise and moral people always find that nothing is permanent in life. Right and wrong, good and evil are only relative. What people consider true sometimes wrong; what they think wrong, sometimes true. That is why we do not always judge and assess thing accurately. However, those people, whose minds are calm and pure, could always and see things from right to wrong, from good to evil right but they are not obstinate about those things.
There was a government official called Tay Mon Bao who lived at Tan Hiep District, where residents had the custom of sending beautiful girls on a raft floating along the river each year to devote to God at seas. He was very surprised at this tradition so he asked the elders to let him know when they had the ceremony so he could see it for himself. When the ceremony occurred, he led the soldiers to the ceremony and asked to see the bride’s face. He then said the girl is too ugly for this purpose. He commanded the fortune-teller to go down into the sea to inform God that he should wait for a more beatiful girl. He ordered the soldiers to throw the fortune-teller into the river in a very sincere and respectful way. But the fortune-teller did not return, then he asked the older men of the village who hold the ceremony to do the same thing. Again, noone returned. He was about to ask some more people to do the same thing, but the rest of the village bowed and begged him not to do so. Since then, the village abandoned this superstitious belief and cruel custom, thanks to Tay Mon Bao.
China has three people ruling the country, and the country was very stable when it was under their administration. When King Tu San ruled, the country was very flourishing because he was so smart that his people could not do anything to deceive him. When King Tu Tiep ruled, people could not treat him badly because he was so kind. And with King Tay Mon Bao, people was so scared of him as he was very strick and he would punish those whose did evil things.
Those are the absolute attitudes that required to rule a country: Be wise as
Tu San, Be moral and kind as Tu Tien, And be courageous and strict as Tay Mon Bao. Tay Mon Bao was wise but a bit brutal and yet still achieved the goal of ruling a country and its residents. The characteristics of the three leaders we mentioned above are similar to three elements in Buddhism Compassion-Wisdom-Courage. Tu Tien represents Compassion; Tu San represents Wisdom; and Tay Mon Bao represents Courage.
So amongst those elements Compasion, Wisdom and Courage which one would we choose? In fact, we would need all of them and depending on the situations, we would need to decide which one is to be used.
I was asked: “Master, we know that we should be ambitious and try to live our dream, but how could we make those dreams come true?”
My answer was that I could not answer your question in a few sentences. This depends on what your dreams and ambitions are. There are many factors and conditions that required to be. Different dreams would require different conditions. But the most important thing is our abilities and again the level of our abilities depend on our blessing that have been accummulated throughout our past lives and current lives. And when we have no blessings we would not be able to succeed. I definitely can confirm this condition.
So for those young Buddhists, you should start doing good deeds from now on. We should help people even with little thing, even just simple as help a kid walk across the street, or pick up an item fall on the street for an elderly person.
The second thing is we need to strengthen our mind. We need to be smart to judge and assess everything properly and accurately. A strong mind is a result of strong body and spirit. We need to do more exercise, practise martial arts to maintain our physical stregth to help clear our midn and make it more powerful. If we are successful at practising meditation, that power will be many times stronger.
This life is full of difficulties and temptations. Our mind must be strong enough to resist those temptations and overcome those difficulties. From now on, we must do more exercise, practise martial arts to strenthen our mind. When we focus on doing something, our mind should be clear of all other things, and just purely concentrate on one goal. When our mind is clear, pure and focused, it helps us to focus, and enhance our ability to assess things properly.
And last but not least we must continue doing good deeds whenever we could, even little by little because the very basic factor contibuting to success is blessing. The more blessings being accumulated, the more chance we have in life to succeed.
Namo Shakya muni Buddha.
