and there's an email waiting for me and somebody was asking a question, and

I'll make it a subject for this evening's talk. In Buddhism we talk a lot about

loving kindness and compassion, but how can we use loving kindness and

compassion, they said, for troubled people? And how come we can we put

boundaries around those troubled people? And it's a very good question

because even though Buddhism is regarded as a very compassionate religion

or path, it also has to be a wise path as well. There's a very old simile

in Buddhism, a bird always has two wings and one wing is compassion and the

other one is wisdom. If you only have one of those wings, a bird can never

fly. If it does take off it goes around in circles, never gets anywhere. So

we always have to balance our compassion with wisdom and this is the case

in point here. We may have some difficulty in life and that's actually part

of life, life is what is difficult. If life was really easy there wouldn't

be much point in taking rebirth as a human being. It's the tests, the

difficulties which we face on our journey between birth and death which

actually provide us with the wisdom and the experience to understand what

compassion truly is and even to develop our wisdom even deeper.

For example, our caretaker Yong [?] was wise enough to know

that it was still a bit warm in here and also compassionate enough to turn

up the fans at the same time. So there you go, there's an example of wisdom

and compassion. If he was just compassionate and thought, 'Oh, may all

beings be cool', that would not have worked. If he was only wise and he

knew how to turn on those fans, that would not have worked. But when you

have wisdom and compassion get together, the fans get turned on and

everybody gets cooled down. But I'm sure there are some people though who are now

too cold! And I already see a few people putting blankets around them. [laughter]

And so even being kind to one person is actually torturing somebody else. [laughs]

This is one of the most important parts of compassion. When we practise

compassion and kindness it should always be to all beings. It's all beings,

not just this person, not just that person, but to all beings. And

sometimes when we practise compassion we have to put every stakeholder into

the equation. So because of this, because it's to all beings, sometimes

that makes life very difficult. How can you actually be kind to all beings?

And I think the solution comes in just the way that question was asked. I

think I've got it right, I may have not remembered the email accurately.

They called actually, there's some people called like troubled people. But

really I never see that there's actually troubled people. There's always

like troubled relationships. So it's not a person who's trouble, because

actually when they're a long way away they're no trouble at all! That's why

there's the old joke, you should avoid, you've got to understand a person

and to be kind you must always walk, walk ten miles

in their shoes to really understand them. And they always joke that that's

a very good thing to do because after ten miles you're ten miles away and

you've got their shoes. [laughter]

But when person's a long way away, of course it doesn't matter how mean,

nasty they are, they're no trouble to you. The only trouble comes when

they're right in front of you or next to you or they're associating with

you. So a troubled person, there's no such thing as a troubled person.

There's always the way that some people relate to you or you relate to the

other person. It's always troubled relationships. And it's not just people.

Because with compassion, it's not just people, it's sometimes things.

Sometimes life is so-called troublesome. Too hot, too cold. Sometimes

trouble is economic problems, health problems, how things go wrong in life.

So it's not just people, it's just life is sometimes troublesome. Now with

people you can sometimes get away from them. That's why I've got a cave in

my monastery. Got two doors, I can hide in that cave and get away. But no

matter how deep your cave is you can never get away from life.

And also, you can never get away from one person. You can get away from

your wife and your husband, from your friends, from your enemies. The one

person you can never get away from in life obviously is you. No matter

where you go, you take yourself with you. Sometimes that's why people get

into alcohol and drugs, just to try to escape from themselves. But of course

it's only a temporary escape because after a while, you're back there with you

again. And that's why also sometimes people get so upset with themselves,

they can't stand themselves, they even commit suicide. But even then as a

Buddhist I know that if you go and commit suicide and commit suicide to

try and get away from yourself, you're still there afterwards. And now

you're a ghost. So you're still stuck with yourself.

There's one thing I will let you know in life. You can never escape from

you. So if you can't escape from you, what should you do if you know you're

troublesome to yourself? It's not you the problem is, it's your

relationship with yourself. It's not the economic problem, it's your

relationship to that. It's not like a troublesome baby, I think it's a baby

in there, or a cat [laughter] squeaking in the corner over there. It's not the baby

over there, it's our relationship to that noise. That's the only difficulty

over there.

So first of all, lets actually redefine the question. How can you employ

metta or put boundaries in troublesome relationships? And those

relationships are with other people, with life, or with yourself. And of

course once we redefine it there it becomes more easy to see it's not the

other person's problem. Because too often we think 'It's their fault'. When

everybody thinks it's somebody else's fault, that's why we always get

conflict in this world. Palestinians think it's the Israelis' fault.

Israelis think it's the Palestinians' fault. I don't know, the workers

think it's the bankers' fault, the bankers think it's the government's

fault. The government thinks, I don't know what the government thinks is at

fault.. oh, the opposition. The government thinks it's the opposition's fault. [laughter]

And it's very easy to think that other people are troublesome. But again,

it's not other people!

There's one of Ajahn Chah's favourite stories and this actually comes

from an old story in the Buddhist commentary. Once there was a dog and the

dog had mange. And the dog's skin was so itchy, no matter if it scratched

it, the mange, the skin disease got worse. That's why sometimes in poor

countries you see dogs with no hair. So this mangy dog was just having such

a lot of suffering and so he decided to run away from the village and live

in the forest. So he went in the forest but still had the suffering there.

So he went actually under water in the pond but still his back itched. So

then he went under the shade of a tree, then out in the sun, then under a

rock. Wherever that dog went it was always suffering until it realised it

wasn't the village's fault, it wasn't the other dogs. It wasn't the forest

or the shade or the sun or the rock's fault. It was actually carrying

around the mange inside of itself. And that's an important thing to

remember that, it's not your wife's fault. It's not your husband's fault.

It's not the government's fault. It's not the economy's fault. It's not my

fault. Certainly it's not my fault. [laughter] And it's not your fault either. We take

this thing around with us. It's always our fault. It's a wonderful way of

looking at it, the mange is why we don't have a proper relationship to

things.

Sometimes in life you do have to deal with troublesome situations. Now

first of all, when you have a difficult situation, lets not say a

difficult person. A difficult situation in life. Sometimes you look at that

situation, it may be economic problems, it may be sort like an itchy

throat. It may be like your plane is delayed and cancelled. It's not,

that's not the problem. The problem is always what you do with that. How

you relate to that. How you make that work to your advantage.

So if I've got an itchy throat and start coughing like this, then people

have got much more sympathy for me and they don't ask so many questions

when I'm finished. So I actually turn it to my advantage so I can get to

bed earlier. If you have an economic problem and you know you haven't got

so much money, then you can become much more green in your life, be more

environmentally friendly. Because when you got poor you can't afford the

big things or you can't afford the car. And instead of getting a car

because you're too poor, you can get a bicycle which is not only good for the

environment but good for your health as well. So even in economic difficult

times you can turn it to your health advantage and other advantages as

well. There's so many things we can do. One thing I've often said here, I

told this in Colombo and people really were stunned by

it because they never heard this before. You've heard it many times before.

If you're in economic problems, what a wonderful advantage that is to

downsize. To get a smaller house or apartment or even better, a small

monk's kuti, a little hut. Because you'll find, number one, it's so

much easier to keep clean.

The smaller the house, the less room, the less housework. It's brilliant.

And also, the smaller your house, the less chance there is of any burglars

coming in. They'll take one look at your small house and they think, 'Wow

if that's the size of their house there's nothing in there.' Where do

burglars go? The big houses. Anyone's got a big house there must be big

things in there. So you have to have no problem with burglars and also

my most important things, when you have small houses, all the people in

those houses, because they're close together physically they soon come

close together emotionally. Big mansions cause so much loneliness in the

family. Husband in one room, wife in another room, son in their room,

daughter in another room and even the dog's got his own kennel in the back.

So why do we do such things? Big mansions actually separate people. Have

you ever noticed why sometimes the kids don't know how to get on with each

other or get on with their parents? When you're really stuck together in a

small place you have to get on together. I've just come back from Sri

Lanka. It's quite a big island, but there's so many people in that place.

They're all crammed together. So they have to get on with each other. Even

though it's actually crazy being driven along those roads. There's so many

traffic in there and tractors and goats and goodness knows what else goes

along the main roads, these are the main highways. But still, people,

because they're used to that, they're much more skillful drivers than sort

of here in Australia. At least those who are still alive are the more

skillful drivers. [laughter] They learn to get on together, they're so close together,

they have to. So there's no other alternative. So close proximity

towards each other actually is a good thing I think.

And sometimes our spread out suburbs, and we all know we don't know our neighbours.

I think it was actually Tim Costello once said that "more people know

the 'Neighbours' TV show than the neighbours living next door to them." So

we really should live in smaller communities so we get to know one another.

And that gives us social harmony, social cohesion. So this is just an

example there of, it's not the economic downturn which is the problem, it's

our relationship to it. And we can do it with loving kindness, embrace it

and make the most out of it. Otherwise we always carry the mange with us,

wherever we go, whatever we do. It's not the economic downturn that's the

problem, it's what we do with it.

It's the same when we have a difficult person which we have to deal with.

So how can you have loving kindness to a difficult person? There's many

people think if you have loving kindness to them, they never change. They

even get worse, they take advantage of your compassion. And of course

you don't have compassion to the other person, you put compassion toward

that relationship which you have. And this is what you deal with. It's not

them, it's not me, it's just what happens in between us when we're together.

So that's where I always put my loving kindness, in that space between me

and that bastard over there, wherever it is. [laughter] I like to use the local

language, please don't get shocked. So, I didn't point to anyone over

there, I wasn't looking. [laughter] It could be over there as well. It's not

particular. It's just an example.

But you know, some times there's some difficult people in life. A good

example of this is, you know that many years ago, this is part of the

history of Bodhinyana Monastery, we had a huge problem with clay trucks

past our monastery. It was noisy but that wasn't the main problem as I keep

on mentioning. It was the danger of those huge trucks with trailers down

that steep, narrow road. And once, I saw one of those trailers tip over.

They lost control. And I saw that and that was very scary. Because I knew if any