They blame those who remain silent, they blame those speak much, they blame those who speak in moderation. There is none in the world who is not blamed. There never was, there never will be, nor is there now, a person who is wholly blamed or wholly praised.
Dhammapada (chapter 17, verse 227-228)
I’ve always been someone who was especially sensitive to both praise and blame. I’ve hoped people think well of me, and despaired at the thought that someone, anyone might not like me. Superficially that has caused me to try to “be a good person”, eschewing activities or actions that others might criticize. I’ve looked on with amazement at people who were able to do what they wanted and ignore what others might think, while observing how that insensitivity sometimes led them to immoral acts, which I’ve judged. On some level this sensitivity has served me well, though its failure modes are also well known to me — cowardice, hiding myself, avoiding conflict, and abandoning my own sense of conscience in order to avoid the consequences1.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve had the chance to really feel the winds of the eight worldly concerns2 come and go. I’ve done things in life that have been objectively blameworthy, and I’ve also been blamed unjustly. There are people walking around in this world who dislike me for good reasons, and for what I take to be bad reasons. Both have been painful in their own way. Everyone has their story, and however desperately I might try to alter it, most of the time I can’t. Letting go of the defensive need to try is part of spiritual maturation. So is seeing these occasions as opportunities to cultivate equanimity.
There is a well known story of the Chinese poet Su Dongpo who sent this verse to the Zen master Foyin:
“I bow my head to the heaven within heaven,
Hairline rays illuminating the universe,
The eight winds cannot move me,
Sitting still upon the purple golden lotus.”
When Foyin returned the poem with the word “fart” scrawled on it, Su Dongpo rushed to confront him in anger. Foyin wasn’t home and instead left him the following lines:
“The eight winds cannot move me,
One fart blows me across the river.”
I’m not writing this to claim total mastery over some of my deepest conditioning. I can tell you how I’ve worked with this tendency though:
The first and most obvious thing that I do when these feelings surrounding others’ opinions of me arise is I drop the story and rest in the pure sensation of the emotion, the swirling energy in my body that arises and then passes.
When the sensitivity to others’ opinions arises I the look for the self that’s being praised or blamed. It becomes an exercise in recognizing the emptiness of the self. I can observe that I didn’t choose to possess good qualities that are being praised, nor did I choose the bad qualities that are being blamed. From this perspective there are merely the causes and conditions that gave rise to the praiseworthy and blameworthy actions, with no substantive self to attach them to. One method of doing this emptiness practice is to look into one’s direct experience for that self - see if it can be be found anywhere in thoughts, sensations, or emotions, and to engage in this high speed search until one has the experiential shift of unfindability - the sense that there are just these aggregated mental formations without some free standing self anywhere to be found.
Only once I’ve worked with the emotional and self-reifying energy of the experience, will I examine the content of the blame, seeing whether there is anything meaningful that I need to change. While the previous view is about the insubstantiality of the agent of choice, this view provisionally accepts the idea of a chooser. Although some ideal of buddhahood is to be unmoved by what others think, I do believe that there is often useful signal to be extracted, and I don’t want to close myself entirely off. I can take corrective action and make amends if that is helpful.
Finally, I often do tonglen (I inhale their pain an exhale their relief), or practice loving kindness and compassion toward those that criticize and dislike me. These are the people I pray for the most and when I meditate I often dedicate the merit of my practice to them. Of course these are for the people I know dislike me - I’m sure there are others that secretly dislike me too, and I can generate some love for them too!
The result of these ways of working is a mind that is less perturbed and more loving, yet sensitive to the useful information contained in people’s judgments. I strive to remain steadfast in my own boundaries and adhere to my felt sense of what’s right.
There is a related idea in AI alignment research that’s come up recently, where an AI that has its Chain of Thought criticized simply learns to avoid putting its true intentions in its thoughts. We are making AIs sensitive to our praise and blame in reinforcement learning, and there are fears that the AI is over optimizing around those signals rather than learning the underlying lesson of what’s right and wrong.
These are: praise / blame, gain / loss, pleasure / pain, good / bad reputation.