Shame & Gratitude

When you’re away from the monastery, sometimes the practice gets very lonely. You think you’re the only person in the world doing it. But that’s not the case. There are a lot of people practicing all over the world. And a lot of them are spreading thoughts of goodwill to all beings.

You’re one of the beings to whom they’re spreading goodwill. So out of gratitude, you find some time to practice. This is called taking the world as a governing principle. And here the sense of the word, “world,” is not what we would ordinarily think about.

When we think about the world, we usually think about the world that’s far away from the Dhamma. But here, you have to remind yourself that there are good people in the world. The meditators throughout the world are a different society. They may not have any institutions to show for it, at least not here very much in the West. But there are individuals, and they’re spreading goodwill.

The Buddha goes on to say that some of them can actually read minds. What if they were to read your mind now? You’re getting lazy about the practice—saying, “I can’t do this, can’t do that.” Think about that: Somebody is reading your mind. What are they going to think?

This is where you develop a sense of shame, a healthy sense of shame. Because the people who can read minds wish you well. They don’t mean to just come down on you in a destructive way. They hold you to a high standard because they have goodwill for you. They have compassion for you.

So here’s a combination of shame and gratitude that we don’t usually think about. Gratitude is for people we love; shame is usually for people who say nasty things about us. They try to make us feel ashamed. But this is a different kind of shame, involving people who mean us well, and we’re not living up to the standards that they would like to see us follow. That kind of shame can help you grow in the path. Because it’s combined with gratitude, it’s not harsh and demeaning. It actually lifts your spirits.

So think about that combination. The people for whom you have gratitude, the ones who are practicing, setting a good example, spreading goodwill to everybody: Try to live up to their standards. Whatever sense of shame you feel when you can’t live up to their standards, it’s all to the good. It makes you want to practice more.

Think about that combination every time you get lazy. There are people for whom you should feel gratitude, and you should feel ashamed for not living up to things they’ve taught you. That, the Buddha said, is one of the guardians of the world. It protects you, and protects the people around you from your unskillful habits. It makes you want to live up to high standards yourself.